Q: Are my design files safe when I submit them to you for manufacturing?
A: We respect customer's copyright and will never manufacture PCBs for someone else with your files unless we receive written permission from you, nor we'll share these files with any other 3rd parties.
Q: I sent you my board files, you checked them that they meet your DRC requirements and you confirmed my order with purchase order form. I still didn't send you the purchase order form back, but I decided to change something in my board. Can I send you my new files and use the old purchase order form?
A: No. Each PO form is exactly for the board received. Also note that when we issued your PO form we already did a lot of post-processing work, so if you decide to send new files for board we already confirmed for manufacturing new PO form will be issued, but in your new PO form there will be file re-processing charge for each new file processed - refer to our PRICE web page for more info.
Q: Do you produce only prototypes or I can order production quantities from you too?
A: We can manufacture PCBs in any volume.
Q: Can I order PCB prototype which you have produced for other customer?
A: Yes, you can, but for this purpose we should receive written permission from the first customer who submitted this PCB. In this case you just have to refer to first customer PO# to re-order the PCB.
Q: I found design on the internet, can you manufacture it for me?
A: We don't investigate if the customer who submit the PCB for production is the original copyright holder, so when customer submits PCB files for manufacturing we assume he have copyright for it and the customer is responsible if he violates copyright law. Be advised that many designs made with Eagle on Internet are made with illegal Eagle licensee, so we can't open them and produce them, so before submitting Eagle design found on internet first check if it's made with legal Eagle licensee read on our TECHNICAL INFO page how to do this
Q: How to define my order?
A: Please include with your PCB files README.TXT as per our web template.
Q: I want to re-order PCB which you have manufactured for me before, should I sent you my files again?
A: If I remember your previous PO# you can just place your order by sending README.TXT as per our web template, instead the PCB files write in the readme your previous PO#. In this case we'll take your info from the archive and you will not have to pay additional charges as Silkscreen fix or Small error charges (even if your first PO had these additional charges).
Q: My board is 3 x 3 cm (1" x 1"). What is the price? Can I pay only for this board area?
A: When ordering prototype panel SSS/SSQ/DSS/DSQ you are paying for the WHOLE PANEL AREA. Try to use this area completely. If your board is small we can panelize it (multiply it) on the panel, but even if you want your board to be placed once on the panel you pay the same price.
Q: I don't get reply to my e-mail. What's wrong?
A: Please check if the Return-Path of your e-mail client is configured correctly. Send test e-mail to other e-mail you can verify that your e-mail client sends e-mails or check if there is not problem with your e-mail server. We respond in 24 hours, so if you don't get reply in this time please re-send your e-mail again.
Q: I asked in my README.TXT for non-standard laminate thickness but the received PO form have no such charge, should I send the PO form?
A: Please always double check the PO forms as we are also peoples and do mistakes, our operator may oversight your requirement, the bottom line is that if you send the PO form back you agree with the written conditions on the PO form, i.e. if there is no charge for non-standard laminate thickness this PO go in our production dept as order and your board will be manufactured on standard laminate thickness as they have no access to your README.TXT.
Q: Can you send me the photo-tools together with the prototypes?
A: No.
Q: Can you assemble and solder my prototype boards? Is there minimum order quantity for assembly?
A: Yes, we can assemble and solder your prototype boards. There is no minimum order quantity.
Q: Why your prices are so low? Are you using junk or low grade materials?
A: The main cost forming factor in the prototypes production is the labor cost. Luckly for you the labor in China is inexpensive and this allows us to offer you excellent quality product at bargain price. We are using the same high grade materials as any other PCB manufacturer. The material cost is only fraction of PCB prototype price.
Q: What import tax I have to pay when receive your boards in my country?
A: You have to check what import taxes you have to pay with your local customs authorities.
Q: What would be our production price per sq per dm / (sq per inch) ?
A: We don't have price per sq per dm / (sq per inch). The board price is calculated taking into consideration the dimensions, how the broad would be panelized, stacked, what are the minimum tracks/spaces, what and how many drill sizes are used etc. You will receive quotation for each case. Please check our Design tips to find out how to design your boards for lower price.
Q: Does the number of holes on my PCB affect my price?
A: We have panel limit which is 500 drill holes for SSS and DSS panels and 2000 holes for SSQ and DSQ panels, if your board panel have more than these you will be charged each time you exceed this limit. For instance if your DSS panel have 501 holes you will get charged once per panel, if your DSS panel have 1001 holes you will get charged twice per panel. For the hole limit charge please check our PRICE web page for more info.
Q: Can I order my board with silkscreen on top and bottom?
A: Yes, we can do this for additional charge please refer to our sales for more details.
Q: What is non-standard drill size?
A: We are using standard drill rack with the following sizes: 0.7 mm, 0.9 mm, 1.0 mm, 1.1 mm, 1.3 mm, 1.5 mm, 2.1 mm, 3.3 mm. If you are using different drill sizes in your board you will be charged for using of non-standard drill sizes. For instance if you use in your board 0.6 mm 1.0 mm and 1.5 mm drill sizes you will be charged for using 0.6 mm drill size which is non-standard. Refer to our sales for more details.
Q: May I have overlapping drills on my board?
A: Overlapping drill holes are not allowed to exist in your design, nor drill slots. If there are only few we'll fix (remove the duplicating drill holes) and charge you one time small amount in your PO form. Please refer to our sales for more info.
Q: How can I pay?
A: We accept payments by: Paypal, Western Union and Bank T/T to our account.
Note that bank T/T payment is subject to additional USD 30.00 bank handling fee. All other payment options does not have additional handling fee.
Q: Is my card info safe with LOYA TEC?
A: We have strict company policy for the card info. The access to this info is restricted to only few LOYA TEC employees in our accounting where the fax numbers written on the PO form are located. The database is not on file or online but kept on paper copy only (your PO form which is in our archive).
Q: I have Paypal account. Can I pay by Paypal?
A: Yes, you can pay by Paypal, but due to the higher service charge we have to increase your order value with 5% if you want to pay by Paypal.
Q: Can I pay by Visa electron or Maestro card?
A: No, we can't charge Visa electron nor Maestro cards.
Q: Can I pay by check?
A: We can't accept payments by check unless the check is issued and drawn in Bulgarian bank.
Q: I want to pay in cash when receive the parcel, can you ship C.O.D. (cash on delivery)?
A: No, we can't ship C.O.D.
Q: I'm not first time customer. I got PO form, should I send fax with my card info every time I order with card?
A: We must receive signed PO form with every order. If you already have ordered with us and your card info is not changed you can send your PO form by e-mail. In this case you must fill everything on the PO form and sign it but in card info field you must only fill previous PO#, card EXP date and card CVC code. Please have look at such filled po form here
Q: Does your price include the shipping to me?
A: No, our price is EXW (ex-works) and doesn't include the shipping charge.
Q: What shipping options do I have?
A: AIRMAIL, Express Mail, FedEx, TNT, DHL, UPS. Please check for the different shipping option in our ORDER web page.
Q: I ordered by airmail shipment. How can I track the shipment?
A: Airmail delivery is recommended parcel post service. This is post office delivery and have no tracking/tracing as Express Mail or the Courier companies.
Q: What is your standard laminate thickness?
A: Our standard laminate thickness is 1.5 mm (0.062")
Q: What other laminate thickness options do I have?
A: We can manufacture your boards also with these non-standard laminate thickness: 0.5 mm (0.020"), 0.8 mm (0.032"), 1.0 mm (0.04"), but you will have to pay additional charge per every panel manufactured on non-standard laminate thickness, please refer to our sales for more info.
Q: Can you manufacture on high frequency materials as Rogers etc?
A: yes we can, but we don't stock such materials, so if you want us to produce your boards on such material you have to supply the base laminates to us. Please contact us for more information how to arrange this, the panel dimensions etc.
Q: What copper thickness option do I have?
A: We can offer 18 um (1/2 oz), 35 um (1 oz), 70 um (2 oz), 105 um (3 oz) copper thickness.
Q: What soldermask do you use for production?
A: We use green Liquid Photo Image (LPI) Solder-mask for our PCB production.
Q: Other manufacturers charge higher price for PCBs with soldermask, does soldermask increase your prices?
A: No, the soldermask is standard option for our prototypes, so all boards are produced with soldermask and this doesn't rise the price.
Q: Will I get discount on my prototype if I ask you to make it without soldermask?
A: No, in matter of fact our PCB finish is immersion gold, which means if your board is manufactured without soldermask it will lead to solid gold deposit on your exposed copper area and your price will be MUCH higher than our standard panel price, if your design require absence of soldermask (RF parts, termal dessipation) please ask for special quote - we can't offer you our standard prices for PCBs without soldermask.
Q: How many soldermasks are printed on the single sided PCBs?
A: We print one soldermask on the copper layer of your single sided boards. It may be on top or bottom depends on where is your copper layer.
Q: Is it possible top and bottom soldermasks to be different, does this involve additional charge?
A: Yes, on the double sided boards we print two soldermasks on top and bottom copper layers and the soldermask may be different (SMT parts) and this doesn't involve additional charge.
Q: What soldermask colors are available for my PCBs?
A: If your board is fast turnaround prototype we offer only one color - green. We can offer black, blue, red green, yellow and white soldermasks for production orders, please check with our sales for more details.
Q: Are your boards ROSH compliant?
A: Yes, the standard surface finish for our prototypes is Immersion Gold plating. This is Ni-Au finish over the laminate Copper. Immersion gold and galvanic gold are the most expensive but the best ROHS compliant surface finishes on the market today.
Q: Why do you use Gold plating isn't it the most expensive?
A: Yes, immersion gold is most expensive, but it's the best surface finish known in the industry today. The immersion gold finish have perfect even surface and excellent solderability and outperform all other ROHS compliant alternatives like SN100C (SnCuNi) HAL or immersion Tin not speaking for the organic coating (colophone+alcohol mix) over bare copper which is worst.
The alternative pure Tin finish is cheap but suffer from these problems:
Aging: you must assembly the boards as soon as possible after the tin finish application as the solderability decreases rapidly with the time and after few months you will not be able to solder your tin coated boards
tin whiskering - is very bad if your board needs to operate or be stored/transported at lower temperatures (do you know what is the temperature in the air cargo trunk?)
Poor wetting when soldering increasing the risk for poor solder joints, so you need aggresively fluxes to be used in order to make good solder joint, which then should be carefully removed as they will oxidize your solder joints if remain not well cleaned
Q: When I send my Drill tools sizes are they before or after the plating?
A: The drill tools sizes are assumed the drill tool sizes for drilling. After the plating in double side PCB the finished hole size will be -0.1 mm. i.e. 0.7 mm drill size will produce 0.6 mm final hole size. You should take this into account when you design your board. The general rule of tumb when you design your custom library parts is that if your component lead is X mm your drill hole should be X+0.3-4 mm i.e. if your component lead is 0.4 mm you must provide 0.7 - 0.8 mm drill hole, if you make the clearance bigger you will have more waste of solder when soldering and you may not fill your pads properly, if you make the clearance smaller you will have problems when you stuff your components.
Q: It is possible to have non plated holes in my double side board?
A: No. All holes are to be plated. If you send us PCB files with split plated and non-plated holes files, the non-plated holes file will be ignored.
Q: What is non-standard drill size?
A: We are using standard drill rack with the following sizes: 0.7 mm, 0.9 mm, 1.0 mm, 1.1 mm, 1.3 mm, 1.5 mm, 2.1 mm, 3.3 mm. If you are using different drill sizes in your board you will be charged for using of non-standard drill sizes. For instance if you use in your board 0.6 mm 1.0 mm and 1.5 mm drill sizes you will be charged for using 0.6 mm drill size which is non-standard. Refer to our sales for more details.
Q: What is your minimum drill size I can use in my design?
A: 0.6 mm (24 mils)
Q: What is your maximum drill size I can use in my design?
A: 5.0 mm (195 mils)
Q: What if I use under 0.6 mm in my design and I send it to you for manufacturing?
A: We'll not process your files and notify you that you can't use under 0.6 mm drill size in your design.
Q: What if I use over 5.0 mm in my design and I send it to you for manufacturing?
A: We'll replace all drill sizes over 5.0 mm with 5.0 mm and will not notify you about this, as we assume you read our web pages ;-)
Q: If I use 0.6 mm drill size what is the minimum pad diameter?
A: 1.06 mm which produce 0.203 mm annular copper ring (8 mils).
Q: I'm sending you my files. Can you substitute the drill sizes in my Drill file to your standard drill sizes?
A: No. We don't alter customer files. Increasing drill sizes outside your CAD program almost always create annular ring violations in DRC check, decreasing drill sizes may cause problems with your component stuffing, so if you want to use standard drill sizes just design your board with these.
Q: Does the number of holes on my PCB affect my price?
A: We have panel limit which is 500 drill holes for SSS and DSS panels and 2000 holes for SSQ and DSQ panels, if your board panel have more than these you will be charged each time you exceed this limit. For instance if your DSS panel have 501 holes you will get charged once per panel, if your DSS panel have 1001 holes you will get charged twice per panel. For the hole limit charge please check with our sales for more info.
Q: What drill sizes can I use in my design? Can I use inch sizes?
A: Yes, you can use inch sizes, but note that we work in metric units and we have drill sizes from 0.6 mm to 5.0 mm in 0.1 mm steps. This means that if we receive your drill sizes in inch units we'll convert to metric and round to 0.1 mm. For instance if you are using 27 mils, 28 mils and 29 mils drill sizes they all will be rounded to 0.7 mm. To convert from IMPERIAL to METRIC you should divide your IMPERIAL drill size to 39.37 i.e. 130 mils / 39.37 = 3.3 mm and vice versa 1.0 mm = 39.37 mils after rounding = 39 mils. If this rounding is not taken into consideration you can easily make DRC violations - for instance you can use 34 mils drill with 50 mils pad/via which should pass the annular ring copper check as the pad-drill is 16 mils, but 34 mils drill = 0.86 mm will be rounded to 0.9 mm and the 1.27 mm pad/via will fail on the DRC check.
Q: May I have overlapping drills on my board?
A: Overlapping drill holes are not allowed to exist in your design, nor drill slots. If there are only few we'll fix (remove the duplicating drill holes) and charge you one time small amount in your po form. Please refer to our sales for more info.
Q: My can generated too many non-standard drill sizes when I process my board, may I manually adjust them to your standard drill sizes?
A: Please DONT MANIPULATE YOUR DRILL HOLES OUTSIDE YOUR CAD PROGRAM - this is very often error made by not experienced Eagle users, in the aim to use only standard drill size they manually increasing their holes after they generate Eagle NC drill files, this is totally wrong approach as always leads to annular ring violations and your board will be not produced. If you want to use standard drill sizes please make this in your CAD and do DRC check to make sure that your board design is error free.
Q: I just learning how to use my CAD software. When I post-process the board my CAD programs generate many different files. Can I zip them all together and send them to you - I'm sure you will find all your necessary information for the manufacturing?
A: If this is your first order - No problem to help you to understand what and where your CAD software puts in your files. Anyway good starting point is to download some of the freeware Gerber viewers from Design tools web page and to evaluate yourself what is the generated file content.
Q: In what file format to send my NC drill files? I have option to generate them as Gerber is it good?
A: NC drill files should be in Excellon or S&M format not in Gerber format.
Q: I have options for different precision, which one to pick?
A: Please use 2.4 or 3.4 precision.
Q: Can you manufacture my board from this: BMP, GIF, TIFF, JPG picture?
A: No, as these formats are not good for PCB manufacturing.
Q: Can I send you my CAD files and you to post-process them for me?
A: Yes, we can do this free of charge if your board is designed with EAGLE. Our customers use hundreds of different CAD products (see our Design Tools web page) which cost between EUR 0 and EUR 50 000 we have no time to learn nor free money to spend and buy all existing CADs on the earth just to process your files to Gerber :) so please do your home work and learn how to generate and check your gerbers.
Q: I use PROTEL can you give me hints how to process my files?
A: Yes, one of our customers: Henrik J. Koch after submitting several times wrong gerbers and learning how and what to do correctly made excellent tutorial based on the his own experience :) so you now can benefit and use it without duplicating his mistakes.
To generate correct Gerber files always have been considered as kind of black magic, or something very hard, which peoples learn after years of design board. The truth is that it's piece of cake when you done it once correctly, and to tell you under secret we have seen many bad generated gerbers/pcb files coming from huge companies and from peoples who have been involved for 20+ years in the PCB design and production, so it's not how long you have dealt with this, but if you had good tutor who to tell you what and how to do :) once you learn if wrong way you can continue to do it wrong way 20+ years.
Q: Where I can learn more for RS274X Gerber format?
A: Excellent source is available here.
Q: My CAD have option to generate the pads as donuts, is it OK to send my files this way?
A: No, please don't send pierced pads gerbers, they look good on your monitor, but are not good for manufacturing.
Q: What is Composite gerbers and negative plots, how bad are they for my design?
A: Composite layer is ancient way to generate your copper pour. This is still used by old CAD software which don't have copper pour hatch stroke filling. Why is bad...pictures
Q: Should I check my Gerbers before send them for production?
A: We highly recommend you to check always your generated gerber files with gerberviewer before send them for production. This will save you money (wrongly generated files which lead to production of board with errors) and time we check your gerbers only once per day, so if you submit wrong files we'll report and if you submit new files will check them next working days.
Q: What is the minimum apreture I can use in the gerbers?
A: Please don't use under 8 mils line widths in your Gerbers on the copper layers. Basically you can use any line width size to fill your copper polygones, but practice shows that if the stroke width is under 8 mils and the CAD program doesn't generate hatch filling simple stroke to stroke filling the quality of the phototools printed is bad. Many CAD programs have 5 mils or 1 mils line width for copper pour set by default so you have to check your settings as we'll put your order on hold if your copper pour is made with under 8 mils stroke width.
Q: I designed my board in Inch (mm) units, in which units should I export my Gerbers?
A: Always export your gerbers in the units you designed board to prevent rounding errors in your Gerber generation due to the unit conversion.
Q: What is good number precision for gerber generation?
A: 2.4 or 3.4 is OK. Some CAD products have default precision 4.2 or 2.3 which is pretty bad for dense boards as the XY coordinates will be rounded to second digit after the decimal point in first case.
Q: My CAD ask me if I want to add offset to XY when I generate my Gerbers, what number I shuold set?
A: Please use offset 0,0 if you add large offset it will do nothing but make your XY coordinates bigger and there may be errors due to rounding or to exceed maximum number which could be present by the selected the precision.