Tucson: Circuit-Board Maker Fills Niche

By Dan Sorenson

ARIZONA DAILY STAR 3/28/2010

Prototron Circuits South­west Inc. started out humble, at least in Tucson.

Parent company Prototron Circuits of Redmond, Wash., was doing work for big-name companies in the Seattle area including Boeing and Ninten­do, even building boards for prototypes of Microsoft Xbox game consoles.

But when Prototron owner Dave Ryder bought South­west Circuits of Tucson in late 1998, Southwest was closed, on the ropes.

“We didn’t open again for four or five months,” he said.

The Tucson branch had to start from scratch, recruiting customers and updating equipment in the building in an industrial park near the Union Pacific tracks between South Alvernon Way and South Palo Verde Road.

Now, Ryder says, the Tuc­son operation does about one-third of the company’s total work.

At the time of the sale, a Prototron spokesman said their strength would be speed, knocking out proto­types in as little as three days.

Now, company execs say, they can often take an engi­neer’s circuit plan from draw­ing to finished bare circuit board in 24 hours.

Prototron produces just bare circuit boards, with the maze of conductive paths that will create a working circuit when the customer attaches components — resistors, ca­pacitors, coils, integrated­circuit chips, input and out­put connectors.

“It can start out as basic as a sketch on a cocktail napkin,” Ryder says of the plans they execute.

“We have turned a board in as little as one shift,” says Kevin Pizzuto, regional sales­man — a veteran of the busi­ness, including a hitch with Southwest Circuits.

There’s a division of clients between Redmond and Tuc­son, Ryder says. Part of it is based on work classifications: Tucson is MilSpec 55110G certified, qualified to build printed circuit boards for U.S. military projects, the kind of work done for Raytheon Mis­sile Systems and other local defense contractors and their subcontractors. It is also ITAR (International Traffic in Arms Regulations) certified, al­lowed to work on projects in which national security is a concern.

The Redmond operation has more of a commercial clientele, Ryder said.

But not all of the Tucson work is defense-related. There’s also a division of work based on geography. Proximi­ty to customers is often an as­set, particularly in the proto­type stage.

The circuit boards Pro­totron builds are only part of another company’s product. And the technical people de­signing those boards often like to get face-to-face with the people carrying out their ideas. They want to know if their ideas work — often as soon as possible.

Being physically available to help a customer improve or debug a design is something that gives Prototron an edge, even with non-defense con­tractors who could use over­seas competitors.

Time is money on proto­type work. A product can’t go into production until a work­ing prototype has been fin­ished, tested, and possibly re­fined.

Having these strong niche positions — proximity and quick turnaround times — lets the operation survive, but Ryder has no illusions about getting too big. Most large­scale production for U.S. cus­tomers went offshore long ago.

There is no beating the Far East manufacturers’ prices on mass-production jobs, Ryder said.

There were only 299 printed­circuit- board manufacturers in the United States at the first of the year, down from 2,500 15 years ago, Pizzuto said.

Prototron Circuits may even get elbowed out on some relative­ly small jobs if the customer crowds too much on price, said Prototron customer R.D. Castillo of Tucson’s Mastek InnerStep. Mastek manufactures electronic devices for other companies. “We do anything from one prototype to 10,000,” Castillo says. “Pro­totron isn’t supplying us with 10,000. We’ll use other compa­nies if we do higher volume, or if we can’t meet the customer’s price point.”

He adds, “They offer bare cir­cuit boards that we choose to buy from them a large percentage of the time because they are local and offer a fast turnaround. They’ve been great to work with in terms of quality and customer service.”

Castillo says Mastek Innerstep once asked, and got, a one-off board made in 24 hours. “Yes,” he says, “it worked.”

That was due to the efforts of technicians in Prototron’s board­fabrication and quality-control maze.

Building the up to 20 layers that make up a finished board, with their maplike “traces” of conduc­tive paths and hundreds of tiny, precisely placed holes into which components’ leads are placed, is a process of 20-some stages. And when it’s done, there’s only per­fect or failure. Without the planned hundreds of connections there is no “circuit,” just “board.”

At the end of the line, after all the circuit-board etching, smelly chemical baths and assembly, waits Emma, the Moving Probe Tester.

The $100,000 robotic CNC (computed numerically con­trolled) tester shoots out and re­tracts needle probes like a crazed sewing machine, checking con­ductivity against a CNC map of the board. It issues a pass or fail grade.

Production manager Richard Reynolds says more than nine out of 10 pass. He says it’s possible to fix some mistakes, but often faster to make an entire new board — and make a customer wait.

So, quality control is more than a poster slogan in a place that de­pends on speed for work.

Future work also depends on the economy’s rebound.

After all, prototype work de­pends on customers building new devices. If it just keeps making existing products, there isn’t much work in that for Prototron, Pizzuto says.

Contact reporter Dan Sorenson at 573-4185 or dsorenson@azstarnet.com

Production manager Richard Reynolds says more than nine out of 10 circuit boards pass inspection. He says it’s possible to fix some mistakes, but it’s often faster to make an entire new board.



Prototron Circuits of Redmond, Wash., bought Southwest Circuits of Tuc­son in late 1998.

• Specialty: Makes “one-off” (prototype) or small- to medium-size batches of bare printed circuit boards. • Peak Tucson employment: 56 in 2008.

• Current work force: 45.