Bennett Bruntil, Brand Marketing Manager, Sono-Tek Corp.

2013 was a very busy year for Sunstone Circuits. Our 41st year in business brought many new product enhancements and releases, all focused on helping the design engineer save valuable time and money.

Here are just a few newsworthy items from Sunstone Circuits in 2013:

In January, we enhanced our Quickturn service by offering Slots and Cutouts on 2-6 layer printed circuit boards. With the new option of Slots and Cutouts on any Quickturn order, including multilayers, Sunstone customers now have even greater confidence in the quality and consistency of their Quickturn PCBs. With this addition, design engineers experienced several added benefits:

• Reduced board design time
  


• A solution for oddly shaped components
  


• Great for custom box enclosures
  


• Enhanced creepage distance and enhanced high voltage control

In March, we continued to improve our Quickturn PCB offering by expanding drill sizes on our service. Sunstone's Quickturn service now offers finished hole sizes from 0.008" to 0.250", with a tolerance of +/-0.005". This expanded set of drill sizes gives the design engineer closer through-hole tolerances than ever before on Quickturn prototype boards. The addition of slots and cutouts, and expanded drill sizes, give customers even greater flexibility to meet their Quickturn PCB design needs.

In August, we kicked off a new whitepaper series with "Domestic Versus Offshore PCB Manufacturing," written by Sunstone CAD/EDA Manager, Nolan Johnson. The whitepaper discusses the costs of offshoring PCB manufacturing and the risks associated with this practice.

In September we launched the newest version of CAD Tool PCB123 which included two major upgrades to functionality: Tools to create slots & cutouts, and file specific hole sizes to be compatible with the Quickturn enhancements. The new benefits of PCB123 version 5 join a growing list of product features which make the prototyping process even easier and more accurate from project concept to PCB delivery:

• Automated Bill of Materials (BOM)
  


• Expanded parts libraries over 750,000 parts to date, largest in the industry by 3x
  


• Seamless synchronization of layout and schematic views

As we enter our 42nd year in business, Sunstone remains committed to meeting the ever-changing needs of the design engineer by continuing to provide the best and most efficient PCB design experience in the industry. The Sunstone team is dedicated to delivering innovative and reliable PCB solutions for our customers, from PCB quote to delivery. Watch for exciting developments from us in 2014!

Thanks to all of our loyal customers and dedicated employees, we feel that this year will be another very productive one with record setting results for Sunstone Circuits.