[sdiy] Importance of electrical test at PCB manufacturing?

[Byron G. Jacquot]

>How important is it to do an electrical test when manufacturing PCBs? I'm going to do a batch of 30 boards and i'd really like to skip the $140 test fee if it's not necessary..

That $140 figure sure sounds familiar...I think I recently ordered 25 pieces each of two different boards from that vendor.  In each batch of 25, there was one board that had been fabbed with shorts - in my case between traces and the ground plane fill.

So what you really need to ask yourself is what the hassle/risk of diagnosing a few boards with shorts is.  Can you triage and rework a board, and still call it usable?  I've worked in shops where boards with repair that was more invasive than reflow or component swaps couldn't be delivered to the end customer (ie: no Xacto hacks or Kynar wire).  It also meant that very little time was wasted looking for board fab problems.

My shorts were in a filter section that caused the circuit to misbehave, but nonfatally.  Had they been in the power supply area of the boards, it would have been a more painful proposition to fix.  

So call it a $140 insurance policy.

Byron Jacquot