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[Jim Layton]

When I was in manufacturing I came across an article about LEDs and quality control. I read about the process of individually testing each LED and grading each one  based on how closely it matched the desired specs. It was called binning. I suppose the term refers to placing the items in containers or bins? I recall a Crown Itech ad that mentioned that the components used in the amp series were better because they were binned for consistency. This would raise price I suppose...but with robots today who knows. On top of this I stumbled on an internet discussion on resistors and other components and quality issues. The group appeared to be advanced hobbyists that were experimenting with and building electronic devices. The group was going deep into specific brands of components and which was better. It seemed that some components, when tested, did nothing. They were basically "wires" with the proper color designation but were so poorly made that they were way out of spec of useless. Take a look at the article linked below.

http://www.electronicproducts.com/Passive_Components/Capacitors/How_to_spot_counterfeit_passive_components.aspx

I am certain every major manufacturer is quality checking. I've worked with Chinese products (not audio) that looked good but died a flaming, melt-down death. The accepted practice was make it cheap, accept high failure rates and give them a new one when it breaks.

[Keith Broughton]

The accepted practice was make it cheap, accept high failure rates and give them a new one when it breaks.

Which is good for the initial price of the component or device. As we all know, Live Better Spend Less, seems to be the current mantra of retail.
However, while a replacement is nice, it doesn't help with the associated trouble and expense a failure might cause and further doesn't address the inconvenience of getting the replacement.
Having seen the labour and cost that went into fixing an "off shore" LED screen system, the lower cost of the initial purchase may have been negated by the repair cost.

[Stephen Kirby]

I've worked with this.  LEDs are binned for color and output.  They then get put onto a reel of the same bin.  This allows for products that use multiple LEDs to have all of them on one product producing the same output.  Then you can calibrate from there to get the final color you want and load that into a system memory.  It's not that one bin is better than another.  It's just that they are in different areas of their tolerance.  If you just put random (within tolerance) parts onto something, it would look different in different areas.  The alternative is selecting only those in a narrow range at the expense of the others.  Which would be cost prohibitive in a consumer product.

Think of matched output tubes, or even a stereo pair of microphones.  They're just selected and grouped together to behave similarly.

[Jeff Lelko]

I'm not sure if this counts as "binning" per say, but I know that when I buy electrical components they're tagged by tolerance as well.  For instance, one of the color bands on a resistor represents tolerance.  The higher tolerance components usually carry a higher price tag too.  I've always thought that this is why some of the Chinese clones of name brand equipment are cheaper than their official counterparts - though the unit might be built off the same schematic, manufacturing costs are saved by using lower tolerance components when populating PCBs, among other things.  This would explain why the unit works fine most of the time, but occasionally glitches when some condition pushes a "just within operational spec" component beyond what would cause the unit to work glitch-free.  Does that sound in line with what the rest of you have come to understand?

[Jim Rutherford]

Binning is a means of statistically analyzing a parameter.
"In statistics, data is usually sorted in one way or another. You might sort the data into classes, categories, by range or placement on the number line. A bin — sometimes called a class interval — is a way of sorting data in a histogram.Nov 6, 2013 statisticshowto



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[Stephen Kirby]

I'm not sure if this counts as "binning" per say, but I know that when I buy electrical components they're tagged by tolerance as well.  For instance, one of the color bands on a resistor represents tolerance.  The higher tolerance components usually carry a higher price tag too.  I've always thought that this is why some of the Chinese clones of name brand equipment are cheaper than their official counterparts - though the unit might be built off the same schematic, manufacturing costs are saved by using lower tolerance components when populating PCBs, among other things.  This would explain why the unit works fine most of the time, but occasionally glitches when some condition pushes a "just within operational spec" component beyond what would cause the unit to work glitch-free.  Does that sound in line with what the rest of you have come to understand?

Binning is different.  Say you have a circuit that needs to divide evenly but you don't want to spend for 1 or 1% tolerance resistors.  If you can work out getting 10% parts binned, you can put all the parts in the upper 1/4 of the tolerance in one batch of boards, parts from the 2nd 1/4 in another batch and so on.  The binned parts will cost more than straight 10% parts, but less than parts selected to be within 2% of target value.  If your circuit only needs the values to be close to each other instead of a specific value, this method works fine.
There are many ways in which corners are cut to save money on knock off products.  It can be cosmetics on the case, using a higher ratio of reground plastic, doing less testing and just accepting field failures and returns, lower cost PCB laminates with less temperature resistance or higher dielectric constants.
Companies concerned with the accumulation of component tolerances do what's called 4 corner testing in product development.  They'll expose products built with parts at the ends of their tolerances to combinations of use limits like over/under voltage supplies or temperature.  This ensures that the thing will work regardless.  But it does tend to driver a few critical parts into better tolerance ranges and more cost.  If you don't do this, you'll have a higher field fallout, but if you save enough money and are able to sell the knock off cheap enough, people will accept this.

[Scott Bolt]

When I was in manufacturing I came across an article about LEDs and quality control. I read about the process of individually testing each LED and grading each one  based on how closely it matched the desired specs. It was called binning. I suppose the term refers to placing the items in containers or bins? I recall a Crown Itech ad that mentioned that the components used in the amp series were better because they were binned for consistency. This would raise price I suppose...but with robots today who knows. On top of this I stumbled on an internet discussion on resistors and other components and quality issues. The group appeared to be advanced hobbyists that were experimenting with and building electronic devices. The group was going deep into specific brands of components and which was better. It seemed that some components, when tested, did nothing. They were basically "wires" with the proper color designation but were so poorly made that they were way out of spec of useless. Take a look at the article linked below.

http://www.electronicproducts.com/Passive_Components/Capacitors/How_to_spot_counterfeit_passive_components.aspx

I am certain every major manufacturer is quality checking. I've worked with Chinese products (not audio) that looked good but died a flaming, melt-down death. The accepted practice was make it cheap, accept high failure rates and give them a new one when it breaks.

The real challenge of design is frequently getting the circuit to work well with cheep components.  Making a circuit that will repeatedly work even with parts that may drift by 20% is much more difficult than creating one with 1% parts.

The biggest binning part is usually the processor or DSP.  Some of the parts will run at higher temperatures and frequencies than others.  These parts are then "rated" for industrial temp specs and given higher frequency ratings.  These parts always cost a premium.

Design can also be used to make a product less expensive.  Using a simple clamp diode arrangement (for those who are engineers) is less expensive than using Zener diodes to protect the circuit.

The mechanism that many Chinesses factories use to "clone" a design is as follows:

• Have someone in the factory give you the manufacturing files (BOM, Gerber's, etc
• Make the board in a plant where there are no regulations on safety or chemical controls to make it cheep
• Replace parts as desired to lower cost
• Replace the enclosure with a less expensive part

[li]Sell the product at cost plus
[/li][/list]

Keep in mind that the engineering on a new product (lets say something in the middle of the road here) costs many hundreds of thousands of dollars (easily into the millions in many cases).  Without having to recover these costs, the device can usually be produced and sold for a much lower cost once the design is stolen.

Something like a digital mixer would definitely cost many millions of dollars to design.  Likely tens of millions.

Most people have no idea how expensive IP is to create.  It is very easy to see the production side of the expense only.

[Lyle Williams]

The plant that you have used for contract manufacture can also run off extra devices "at night" (or the following week, etc)

Build cost is often <10% of product price. 

[Stephen Kirby]

Direct labor runs between 3% for simple products to 7% for complex PCBAs and maybe 10-12% for complex final products.  80+ percent is material costs.  If you can work a deal for untested or less tested parts you can lower the cost of materials appreciably and thus make substantial savings on the wholesale cost of the product.

Scott, you may be confusing grading with binning.  Grading is where you test and separate out parts to some performance attribute like processor or memory speed.  Binning is when all of the within tolerance parts are acceptable, you just need to group them within a product.  The one I've worked with most often on the floor are LEDs with chromaticity bins.  So that you get the same color and brightness all across some panel.

[Mike Diack]

Scott, you may be confusing grading with binning.  Grading is where you test and separate out parts to some performance attribute like processor or memory speed.  Binning is when all of the within tolerance parts are acceptable, you just need to group them within a product.  The one I've worked with most often on the floor are LEDs with chromaticity bins.  So that you get the same color and brightness all across some panel.

And it has been around pretty much since the birth of electronics, for the same reasons.

[ProSoundWeb Community]