Product Planning: Choices in Material and Micromachining Processes
Lets say you have a very small component to be fabricated, and you anticipate the need for micromachining services of some type- laser, EDM, MEMS, Mechanical. But you are not sure of which process exactly.
You can save a lot by being flexible, if you can, about the material you need to use in the initial stages. Product development involves numerous steps, many going in parallel. If you just want a device to test for mechanical fit, it is much easier to fabricate it using a rapid prototyping technique like laser micromachining rather than a silicon micromachining process. Consider being flexible right at the idea generation stage so that when you get to to concept development, you are not moored to a particular material and hence a very limited set of prototyping processes.
Often, product developers/inventors have a pre-conceived notion of the manufacturing process they want to adopt later on- without even arriving at the concept development stage. Considering that a number of such ideas never ever see the light of the day in the market, stay focused on the end-need. That way, you can quickly create some prototypes, dismiss the ones that don’t work out, and along the way also understand material and fabrication requirements.