- Joined
- Nov 21, 2020
As to who to get to do the design. Local is almost always better. They speak the language, same time zone, etc. Make sure the contract is solid as far as who owns the work product, etc.
There are a few standard tricks to protect your intellectual property when dealing with design or assembly services. 1. Don't tell them everything, maybe give them a few parts that you just provide the pinout but not the exact part number and then install the final parts yourself 2. Break it into sub assemblies and have different places assemble different parts, which I think you already mentioned was part of your design. 3. For microcontrollers/EEPROMS don't give them the software to load, handle it yourself.
Potting PCBs can help with security and resiliency, but I don't think most potting compounds are all that great at thermal management, looks like there are some specialty compounds that do work but you'd need to check the specs and heat you need to dissipate. Aluminium, for instance is 237 W/m-K and a randomly selected compound is 0.3 W/m-K, so not all that great but you would have more contact with the board and parts than a normal heatsink.. Also you have to design the enclosure for it and deal with interconnects and connectors and make sure they don't get filled with epoxy. Another thing, since you mentioned RF is that the boards likely would need to be created with encapsulation in mind as the trace routing and impedance matching usually just takes into account the board material, solder mask, copper weight and air as the dielectric. Depending on your margins slapping epoxy or even conformal coating over it may get some stuff out of spec.
And I'll point out as close as I've gotten to RF is a couple boards passing 1MHz I2C signals.
