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44 The PCB Magazine • October 2015 with vias on every layer and five sets of cop- per-filled laser micro-vias, and four lamination cycles, within a week (Figure 2). APCT is unique in that they confirm the raw material delivery date from their supplier before they will quote turn time to their customer for the job. Other quick-turn specialists employ consignment inventories and close communi- cation and partnership with their material sup- pliers as a means of delivering on the speed re- quirements in today's market. Benefits of On-Site Assembly One benefit of having on-site assembly, which Advanced Circuits Inc. (ACI) has in their Colorado location, is that it allows vertical inte- gration, and consequently, speed. The company also distributes proprietary layout software (as a puTTing iT All TogeTher THE ECONOMICS OF REDUCING CyCLE TIME IN PCB FABRICATION free download) that generates automated files optimized for their production process. The re- sult is that ACI can support double sided builds for same day shipment and 4–6 layer boards for next day production. Creative Technology However, in order to provide world-class cycle time through your shop and differentiate the shop from overseas competition, it is critical that the cycle time of each of the component steps of your board production be balanced. One way to pull ahead from the competition is to employ creative technology approaches to building boards. For example, Prismark mod- eled a 10-layer smartphone build for Ormet using a parallel lamination technique that re- sulted in 28 hours of cycle time versus the 107 Figure 2: Stackup of a typical 10-layer aPcT hDi one-week turn-time job. Figure 3: hDi buried via application using paral- lel lamination.