ShenZhen2U PCB Review

This ShenZhen2U PCB Review focuses on another low cost PCB manufacturing and electronics assembly firm located in China. Their website isn’t the most sophisticated however they offer quite a wide variety of fabrication options under both their standard and premium PCB services.

Cost

As a budget PCB fab, I expected my final cost with ShenZhen2U to be on the very affordable side and I wasn’t disappointed when the final price was $9.90/10 copies of the Manufacturing Reports Test Coupon. DHL shipping was an additional $25.53 for an order total of $35.43.

There were no extra shipping or bank fees tacked onto the order, and payment was processed through PayPal.

Ordering

The ordering process starts with describing your board stackup. This is a review of their standard PCB service, but their premium board service showed options for more technical boards: buried / blind vias, varying copper weight by layer, etc. For Eagle users, they have a downloadable set of EagleCAD DRM specs available as well, which is a nice touch.

An interesting option I saw during ordering, was the “Need Photos before shipping” option. There isn’t any further information as to what this might be, so I selected it. Should it be some form of approval process, I won’t hold any delay caused by this against their fulfillment score.

Design Rules are published on the order page, towards the button under the “PCB Capabilities” tab. Normally we’re able to do a google search for “Manufacturers Name Design Rules” but no useful information is available for ShenZhen2U using that method.

I uploaded the Test Coupon gerbers and, after getting a shipping quote, added the board order to the shopping cart and went straight to the checkout page. You aren’t offered a board render or a gerber file preview, so if you have multiple orders going at once, your only way of telling items apart seems to be from the single file name mention in the shopping cart. There is also no option to have a manufacturers mark removed, although none was printed on the front or back silk layers in the boards I received.

It was nice to be offered the possibility of a “Guest Checkout” rather than being forced to register, however I chose to register anyway, under the assumption that it would be easier to check order status with an official login.

I entered the account registration details, verified the address, selected the payment method, clicked “Checkout” and immediately received a JSON page error.

It’s not a particularly encouraging sign when you have to figure out how to workaround errors like this, so I checked my email and discovered the registration had gone through (their welcome message included a 15% discount code off the first order), so I logged in and successfully resubmitted the order with payment processed by PayPal. An email confirmation was sent with an invoice included, and the PayPal receipt showed English names for the transaction.

Fulfillment

Normal turn service was selected, advertised as 4-6 day turn on a 2 layer board. When day 7 arrived, I used their support form to request an order status and was told that the order was “in production and would be finished soon.” Before I received their response, I got a weird form submission confirmation that essentially just looked like I’d sent the message to myself.

After waiting another three days, another stat request was sent, since the 4-6 day turn had now stretched to 10 calendar days, which isn’t great when writing the ShenZhen2U PCB Review. The next morning I were told that the order was done and that a tracking number would be updated. The email included an attached picture of the completed boards in vacuum packing, however even after several days had passed, no tracking number had been emailed, and no text message was sent from DHL with expected delivery times. The wait continued.

One day later I requested another update and received a response indicating that the board had shipped with apologies for not having sent the tracking number. It’s not a good sign when customer service tells you that your order has shipped, but you don’t get the automated email telling you the tracking number until after that message, and even then, the DHL tracking shows only that the label has been printed, but not picked up yet. That email also had the image of the packaged boards attached.

While I did select “Need Photos before shipping”, and I did receive a single photo before the order shipped, I had an expectation that the photos would allow me to review the order before it shipped, rather than just receiving a photo of a stack of shrink wrapped boards.

The order finally arrived 5 days later. The total time from order to shipping was 14 days against an advertised 4-6 days. Even taking full weekends into account and granting the full six days to fabricate and ship, the boards were delayed four days.

The boards arrived in a ShenZhen2U branded box, wrapped in foam padding and vacuum sealed in a padded sleeve with desiccant. 17 copies of the board were delivered from which 10 were selected at random. The quantity of spare boards was so large I had to double check the order to make sure I hadn’t accidentally keyed in the wrong amount.

Customer Service

The customer service pages are pretty sparse. With other sites, there is some kind of status, showing you where you are in the manufacturing process, however all you get with ShenZhen2U is a six column table showing your order id, order status (“pending”), date, “No. of Products”, Customer Name and the order cost.

Determining the status of your order is difficult as the only updates you receive from the order information page are Pending, Processing and Producing.

ShenZhen2U Order Status

No email address is published for support, so I used the form on the Contact Us page to request a second copy of the invoice. Again, I first received the copy of that request looking as though I had emailed myself. Six hours later (9AM Shenzen), a clean PDF copy of the invoice was emailed from the factory.

During the several rounds of contacting customer service to obtain the status of my order, the Order History never changed, even after having been told it was packaged and ready for shipping.

Circuit Board Visual Inspection

While reviewing my voice recording of the ShenZhen2U PCB Review visual inspection, the phrase heard most often was, “dirty boards and bad silkscreen.” For some reason milling dust and general dirt had to be continually wiped from the boards, causing cycles of “Is that some contaminant embedded in the solder mask? No, that’s just some dirt.” followed by wiping the board down with isopropynol. The silk layers have misprints and spatter evident on every board.

The board edges were cut leaving clean and smooth edges, and the non-plated mechanical holes and slots were all generally well formed with only slight lead-in/lead-out witness marks on each.

The HASL finish was consistent throughout the boards as well, with only one board having an abnormality, located in the heat sink area, however on all boards there was no apparent wicking of the surface treatment into the via stitching.

PCB Dimensions

The board edges and mechanical dimensions of the non-plated slots and drills were properly machined and well within tolerance. There were lead-in/lead-out witness marks in the non-plated slots and M5 clearance drills, but the marks did not throw the features out of tolerance. Many of the board edges measured exactly on the 75mm or 50mm spec.

The positioning of the NPTH and PTH features all matched correctly with their jigs.

The plated slots on the USB connector were straighter than I usually find and all perpendicular to the board edge, demonstrating none of the typical potato shaped slots that are typical in small milled features such as these.

Trace widths were all within tolerance if consistently undersized by a 1 mil in general.

Vias were off center but not dramatically so, and only in two cases was the diameter of the drill sufficiently offset from the via center to render a score below 4.

ShenZhen2U Test Report 2019

Copper Layer Quality

Visually, the HASL was clean across all boards except in one instance where some contaminant was embedded in the heat sink area. The surface finish for the solder surface was acceptably uniform, not as rough as some, not as smooth as others. There was a scratch that damaged a trace and indented another on one board.

Copper weight was above the minimums and consistent across all boards.

The QFN and QFP footprints were well reproduced on each board, and the pads were distinct. The passives footprints were all present and clean, and even the 0201 showed clear definition to its pads.

The plating on the Micro USB through hole slots was clean and consistent as well.

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Solder Mask Quality

While there is no score for “general dirtiness”, all of the boards seem to attract surface dust and dirt from my work bench to a unique degree, with each needing to be wiped down repeatedly during inspection.

The mask is well applied, and clear of the pads on all boards. In some cases, the mask / pad clearance is some of the cleanest I’ve seen.

Many boards had scuffs and abrasions on them that marred the mask. One board had a scratch deep enough to expose the trace underneath, and another had HASL spattered and embedded into the mask.

Silkscreen Quality

I expect low resolution Direct Legend Printing, even if I’m not happy with it, but the silkscreen shipped on the boards for the ShenZhen2U PCB Review is simply awful. Not only is every board printed with exceptionally low resolution, but they also universally featured spatter and misprints everywhere: not one board was clean, not one board had completely legible reference designators. One board had ink smeared across the entire back side, contaminating exposed copper and mask alike.

Bear in mind that I was meticulously clean when photographing the boards for this review. When looking at all the photographs in this review, if you see white dots spattered here and there, those are silkscreen overprints, misprints and smears.

Solderability

Both the QFP32 and Micro USB Connector sat flat on their footprints and soldered easily, with no difficulty moving the QFP into alignment by hand.

The QFP pads showed no apparent wear from the two cycles of rework. The solder mask showed insignificant degradation after the first pull of the chip, and only slightly greater erosion after the second. Mask wear was only noticed where traces led directly away from pads, and not at random spots on any traces surrounding the pads.

The USB connector showed significant solder mask erosion after rework, with one trace shedding its protection back from the pad by slightly over 2mm. The pads appeared unaffected.

The silk screen, such as it was, did not appear to suffer any damage from the rework processes.