PCBONLINE

PCBONLINE is the export brand of Global Success, a PCB group that makes bare boards, assembles them and can build the whole product around them. Its Shenzhen assembly plant is in Shajing, Bao'an, a district full of board shops. It takes everything from one-off prototypes to high-volume runs, and you can price a board yourself with an instant online quote.

The group has been making boards for about two decades. Founders Ho Huang and Winson Zhang, both electronics engineers, started out trading PCBs and components, then opened board factories in Shajing. Fabrication later moved to two bigger plants outside Guangdong, in Jiangsu and Jiangxi, which between them cover FR4 up to 64 layers, HDI, flex and rigid-flex, ceramic, metal-core and high-frequency boards. Assembly stayed in Shenzhen, in a 5,000 m² dust-controlled, anti-static workshop with two separate lines just for high-end samples. The parent lists its head office in Hong Kong, and PCBONLINE also mentions a factory in Vietnam and sales teams in the US and Singapore.

Their sweet spot is tougher boards for demanding markets: aerospace, defense, telecoms, automotive, medical and industrial. On the assembly side they run Yamaha YSM20R placement machines, 3D SPI (a camera check of the solder paste), AOI before and after reflow, X-ray, first-article inspection, functional and aging tests, and build to IPC-A-610 Class 2/3, the workmanship standard most buyers specify. Board tests include flying probe, impedance and four-wire testing. They'll also source components and do box builds, where the finished board goes into an enclosure as a complete product.

You can start with the instant quote or email Gerber and BOM files for a free check before quoting. There's no minimum order, and orders of $5,000 or more get free PCBA samples before the batch. Lead times run from eight working hours for simple jobs to 30 days for box builds, shipped by air or sea. Customer Jim Klitzing put it plainly: their price "is not the lowest" he was quoted, but the way they handle customers gave him confidence in the fab.

PCBONLINE fits engineers who need advanced boards (HDI, rigid-flex, RF materials, many layers) assembled in one place, and teams heading from prototype to production who'd rather not juggle a fab and an assembler. The same group also sells as SCSPCBA, so it can be worth quoting both. If you're after the cheapest simple two-layer prototype, a budget instant-quote shop may be cheaper.