How much does a power amplifier development cost if you order development?

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#64
jan.didden said:
So do you believe that your amplifier will be successful if it is modern and novel enough? Honest question.

Jan
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Why do you need this? It is uniquely modern, and it is perfectly visible in the simulation for those who understand this.
Success is a more complicated question. Is the Parasound A21 successful? Or Coda CSib? Are they successful with their sales and development experience?
 
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#67
I hope that the thread could be brought back on topic, because the original question is a interesting one. The underlining assumption of post #1 seems to be this one: to mass produce an electronic device according to a proprietary technical developement or idea, you need to build a comprehensive design package with the help of a design firm; then you give it to a manufacturer, and after a while they give you the finished product ready to sell. That's not the only way to bring a product on the market. On my professional experience I've seen several different ways to design and manufacture a proprietary design. There is no best way, it depends from the nature of the device and also from external factors. I don't have enough information to guess what the best approach for Gunfu may be, but I will explain a different approach that may be succesful if the end product does not need high volume production or extreme cost optimization. There are many contract manufacturing companies that can do at low price the mechanical and electrical engineering, the compliance check and the production starting from a partial specification or a skeleton design. The catch is that they will retain some or all manufacturing files such as the pick and place and gerber files for the PCBs, or the firmware source code. There is a engineering fee to pay upfront, that also cover che costs of a few hand-made prototypes, and a minimum quantity order, to be paid at first delivery. Unit price is higher than the market average, but the manifacturing company is gambling to recover the engineering expenses by having a long term production contract. A major advantage of this approach is that the developement cycle is shortened, because you don't have to deal with a design company and then a separate manufacturing company that may not have a production process that is optimized for the design or may need further design files, to be produced by the design company with extra costs and time. With this approach, the product developement cost is partially merged with the production cost. As a rough extimate, you may expect to pay something in the range of 10K euro upfront for the design, then 3-10k for EU/UL compliance checks, then a markup of 20-40% on the unit price of the delivered product depending of the product complexity and the amount of actual design they need to add to your skeleton design.
 
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#70
pcan said:
With this approach, the product developement cost is partially merged with the production cost. As a rough extimate, you may expect to pay something in the range of 10K euro upfront for the design, then 3-10k for EU/UL compliance checks, then a markup of 20-40% on the unit price of the delivered product depending of the product complexity and the amount of actual design they need to add to your skeleton design.
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If Ferrari had taken this approach, he would have gone broke in two years. EUR10k for a design? ROFL. Do you think Giotto Bizzarrini gets out of bed for this chump change?
 
#72
One of my friends once said that a circuit developed in a computer model might not work in the real world ... To which I replied that a circuit that could not work even in the virtual world would certainly never work.
Moreover, even a good real scheme with errors may never work correctly.


All modern manufacturers are now modeling their circuits on computer models, which should confirm their performance and understanding of correctness. This is the cheapest and fastest way to avoid errors, troubleshoot, fine tune and select items. Only after this stage do they make a real layout.
My circuit also did not work right away, the first time it turned on it gave a terrible result, and only after several weeks of numerous iterations did I find circuit malfunctions and precision settings of the built-in generator which also produced very noticeable distortions. For me it was very difficult and tiring, because with such high accuracy the computer does the calculations extremely long.
 
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#73
haiqu said:
If Ferrari had taken this approach, he would have gone broke in two years. EUR10k for a design? ROFL. Do you think Giotto Bizzarrini gets out of bed for this chump change?
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On this production contract type, the engineering fee is a trade-off with the price markup and the number of production boards that are ordered. If the supplied schematic diagram is mostly finalized and the required PCB and firmware designs are a standard job, then 10k could be a pretty standard engineering fee for a production run of 1k boards/year; it may even be lower on some instances. This is only a ballpark figure, of course.
 
#76
I have already received data that the old development of the amplifier sold for the second time will cost from 15,000 to 30,000 USD. The new one will obviously be about twice as expensive. The branch can be closed, thank you all very much for participating.
 
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