From Concept to Reality

About Us

Whizz Systems is an Engineering and Manufacturing Services company headquartered in Santa Clara, CA. Since opening our doors in 1999, we have developed a reputation for consistently delivering quality on time. Our proven track record with customers such as Cisco, Xilinx, Foundry Networks, Apple and more say, ‘Excellence' like no other.

Certified Government Contractor / Small Minority-Owned Business
ISO 9000 Certified / Cage Code# 4RMN1

Having such a wide range of highly integrated services, we offer a unique combination that has culminated in our joint success. With a dedicated team of EE's and ME's conducting all Design, Part Selection, Simulation and Ibis Modeling, a Superior Materials Management Group, and an Exceptional Manufacturing Staff, augmented by our brand new state of the art RoHS compliant manufacturing equipment, we remain heads above the rest. Unlike our competitors, all of our services offered are in-house making us the correct choice as your ‘time sensitive partner'.

For your quick-turn and production PCB fab requirements, we have partnered with Tier 1 and Tier 2 local and offshore fab houses, benefiting you with our ability to place that line item on the BOM in to the fab house who is best suited within that core competency. We are able to achieve quality and minimize risks due to our dedicated offshore QC and technical support team, which remain absolutely seamless to you.

From our wide range of services offered, you can choose an approach best fitting for each project. Most importantly, we are flexible and will custom tailor a business model that makes sense for you. We work as an extension of your own team with our effective solutions and Signal Integrity expertise that will reduce your burn rate and get you to market sooner.
We have cultivated successful and long lasting relationships with customers and vendors. By doing so, we have established a rich eco-system that brings success to all. We are proud to say, “Our business has grown primarily from referrals”.

Whizz Services:
Design     SI / Simulation     PCB Layout     Turnkey Prototypes     Production     Test     Rework

DESIGN:

We respond to evolving market changes

Reference Design /Silicon Evaluation Boards.
Our highly experienced engineering team will take your spec and turn that into a working board. With a multitude of tools in-house and the ability to design on a platform of your choice, we have taken several projects successfully from an evolving marketing spec to a fully released product.

We service a diverse market place, and have acquired experience in multiple market segments including networking, communications, wireless, graphics, systems, consumer electronics, portables, and hand held devices. High Speed design is our specialty, ensuring success by deploying proven design methodology ( Including Signal Integrity analysis ) and appropriate resources for the projects. Our full service design team can help you at any stage of the project, ranging from spec finalization to board bring-up. Our services include the following :

• Spec Finalization
• Component Selection
• Design
• Schematic Capture
• Design Verification
• Debug
• Sustaining Engineering

We offer sustaining engineering support in a variety of ways. Following are some of the services that we provide to our customers:

• Schematic Conversions:
Most often your customers require you provide reference designs in multiple formats that are different from your in-house tool flow. We help you in these situations by taking your existing schematic and provide an equivalent schematic in required tool platforms.

• Design Modifications:
As a Semiconductor company, your resources provide customized reference designs to your top few customers. Allow us to provide an extension of your in-house engineering team, on demand, to further customize the reference designs supporting additional customer requests. This will provide you a competitive advantage that others do not have, and will result in increased design wins without incurring a permanent overhead.

As a Systems company, your design resources are precious. The smaller but important tasks of modifications, conversions, or adding features can create a bottleneck and impact new product development. You can outsource product maintenance tasks to our engineering team, and focus on new product development.

• Library Development:
Schematic Symbol creation is a time consuming task, and is probably not the best use of your engineering bandwidth. We have a very large dedicated library group to quickly turnaround your new symbol requests on a daily basis. We run multiple shifts, and usually can turn around a request overnight. A request received by early afternoon, is normally delivered by next morning. This service has greatly helped our customers in increasing their design bandwidth without hiring additional resources. Our library team, can at the same time develop an equivalent mechanical library symbol for layout, and help you generate a BOM with appropriate device file names. Most importantly, this coordination eliminates the 2 to 3 day provision for library symbol generation when you are ready to start the layout.

We provide a wide range of services, and let our customers engage with us at any level. We have a very large and skilled engineering group willing to customize a services model that fits your requirements.

• Tools:
Schematic:
Cadence OrCAD, and Concept.
Mentor View Draw

Signal Integrity/Simulation:
Cadence Specctra Quest

Layout:
Cadence Allegro Expert
Cadence Specctra Autorouter
Mentor PADS

DFX:
Valor Internal Scripts

SIGNAL INTEGRITY / SIMULATION:

Simulation reduces product design cycle time

PCB design is no longer just the process of connecting the pins on a number of packages. Now, board design is subject to significant pre- and post-routing analysis for Signal Integrity, cross talk analysis, transmission line design, correct terminations, electro-magnetic interference (EMI), thermal, and manufacturing requirements.

The analysis require new tool capabilities to supplement the basic interconnect routing functions. Also, the disparity between the rate of change of silicon technology and the rate of improvement of design capability has greatly increased.

We have made significant investment into our SI infrastructure (tools, process, and expertise) to enhance our value add to you. With experienced engineering staff in-house, and state of the art SI tools, Simulation is another area where we outrival our competitors. Integration of SI practice with design and layout flow has paid big dividends on many projects. We offer multiple options depending on your overall project plan. Let your project benefit from our expertise.

Simulation involves the following aspects:
• Pre Layout Simulation
• Post Layout Simulation

In our SI approach we address the following areas:
• Floor Planning analysis
• Develop a set of constraints to be followed during routing
• Topology Design
• Transmission Line
• Termination Design
• Post Layout Verification
• Timing
• Net lengths
• Cross Talk

Simulation can be as extensive as running simulation on multiple boards as a system, and it can be as simple as running simulation selectively on few critical lines depending on each project's requirements. We can identify the risk areas of the circuit, which will benefit from SI during the project planning phase. With proper planning, during the schematic phase, we can put together all the models required for simulation.

PCB LAYOUT:

We are the High Speed Experts; Engineering approach towards layout

We are the ONLY service bureau with EE's on staff to do the board layout. Traditional designers approach toward layout is more mechanical than electrical. Today's designs require a lot more than that. This is why we have invested in EE's to actually do the board layout. Our designers understand the schematic, and the Signal Integrity domain.

Whizz Systems is among the larger PCB design groups in the world. Running two shifts, we are capable of placing multiple engineers on the board at the same time. We are very efficient in our approach, and can shrink routing schedules from months to weeks, and from weeks to days. For situations where boards are very highly constrained and the auto router is not a good answer, we offer 100% hand routing.

Coming from a CM background, we understand the importance of DFX, and have invested greatly in developing internal tools to automate these functions. We have taken several products from concept to very high volume production seamlessly. We have an elaborate process in place incorporating the best DFX practices in our design flow. This includes industry standard tools including VALOR, and also several scripts developed internally.

For Semiconductor companies, we specialize in providing Silicon Evaluation Boards, and Reference Design Boards. These boards have different considerations than production boards. In the product-planning phase, we establish a set of requirements for the project, and deploy appropriate methodology.
Being a service company, we offer different business models. You can outsource complete projects to us, or if you have in-house CAD group, we can work with your team in a TAG-TEAM approach to provide you the bandwidth in the required areas. We will custom tailor a business model that best fits your requirements.

DFx:
We come from the CM world, and have taken several programs from concept to very high volume offshore production. DFX is well integrated into our design flow through all stages of board layout. All of our designers are well trained on design for manufacturing and design for test issues and always get live feedback from our in-house manufacturing staff after each run of proto builds. This helps in continuous improvement in our process, tools, and knowledge base.

We use leading tools like Valor to incorporate DFx into our design flow. In addition to Valor, we have developed number of scripts to enhance our DFx. We have customized our DFM reports to easily readable graphics format so that we can quickly identify potential issues. Every time we learn something new, we translate that into scripts to further enhance our design for manufacturability and design for test tools.

Our Strengths:
• EE's and ME's to do your layout and library development work
• Run multiple shifts to reduce project schedules
• Onshore and Offshore resources, where offshore is totally transparent to you
• Ongoing internship program with leading universities to help scale our growth
• 10+ years of average experience per designer
• Excellent delivery track record with most leading names in the Valley

TURNKEY PROTOTYPES:

Our team at Whizz Systems pioneered the turnkey model in 1988. The same team, through two acquisitions, has remained intact. Our expertise in working with engineering groups doing the design, building prototypes, and providing precious documentation is invaluable in decreasing your burn rate and getting you to market sooner with a reliable product.

While working with startups, running at full speed is normal when the design is still being finalized. And at the same time, working with very large companies, where AVL considerations, interfacing with multiple groups within the customer organization, and still keeping the project on track is expected of us, Whizz Systems bridges the gap between engineering and operations. With the right team, tools, equipment, and experience to get the job done, let us be your time-to-market partner for all of your PCB requirements.

PCB Fabrication:
We work with premier PCB houses locally to build your printed circuit boards. With a well-defined model in place to quickly identify the right fit based on your technology, turnaround, and quantity, we are confident in getting you the best value for your money. For more simple “vanilla” boards, we marry them up with a more cost effective Tier 2 or 3 “proven” source while high-end boards will go to our high-end Tier 1 suppliers. We have built PCB’s with extreme complex parameters and have a very close working relationship with all of our suppliers. During the layout phase, we identify the right fab partner based on the following parameters :

• Layer count
• Stackup
• Hole sizes and tolerances
• Material requirement
• Quantity and Turn-around time.
• Complexity

When the design is finalized, our fab partner is prepared for the project in which material may be an issue or planning may take longer which is extremely important for quick-turn PCB projects ranging from a 24 to 72 hour turn.

Material Procurement:
This is another area where we surpass our competitors. Most people have the manufacturing equipment, but very few actually have a good materials team that performs well on quick-turns. Our materials team closely interfaces with our in-house design teamduring the design phase to identify lead-time parts, recommend packages readily available, and raise the flag on EOL parts. Our process is setup to track the daily changes made by engineering during the design phase, and transmit the BOM changes to the materials team. This close coordination is key to successful delivery of quick-turn prototypes and a smooth transition into production.

We have developed sophisticated tools to help manage our inventory, generate customized reports, handle MRP functions and manage our proto and production builds. Coupled with our capability to add new functions, improvements, and customer required formats to our MRP system, we can also work with engineering BOMS without part numbers, and produce a production BOM with spec for all parts that we choose with your approval. We have an extensive inventory of commonly used parts in-house. At the same time we are closely tied with Tier 1 distributors, and brokers all over the world to get the parts in time for quick turns, while scheduling the rest with distributors for production. This is what makes us cost competitive and cost efficient.

Printed Circuit Board Assembly:
We have a brand new SMT RoHS compliant setup in-house. Commonly assembling very complex boards with over 2800 pin count BGA packages and equipment capable of placing 0201 components, you will not be required to find a different house for these needs, nor will you be asked to purchase the fixture to get the job done.

The boards we routinely build have several high pin-count BGA devices on them. Following are some highlights of our PCB assembly capabilities:

• RoHS compliant process
• BGA packages down to .5mm pitch.
• QFN Packages
• Straddle mount high pin count connectors
• Press fit connectors
• 0201 component placement capability

Quick turn is a norm in our business. We have delivered boards with over 4600 components in 24 hours. Our yields are well above industry average. With case studies from very large and well-known customers, we have steadily improved their yields from high 80’s to 99%. With proper DFx during the design phase, and good manufacturing process, we are hitting 99% yields on most of our programs. All boards during proto builds are 100% inspected. For production, we address all the variables up front to improve your product yields.

Rework:
We support all of your rework requirements on a quick turn basis knowing the importance of debug. During this phase, we routinely support our customer requests for the following items:

• BGA removal, and mounting
• Cuts/jumps
• QFN Packages
• Incrementally populating / depopulating the boards
• Custom adaptors to address different pin-outs

PRODUCTION:

Onshore Production:
Whizz Systems offers consigned and turnkey production services. For small to mid-volume production quantities we have the setup in house. We are a good fit for customers who need more than prototype capability, but do not have require a large enough volume to get the attention from large CM’s. With a proven CM infrastructure in-house, we are service driven and offer you the flexibility that large CM’s cannot.

We have the tools to manage production builds of various sizes, ranging from a few boards to a few thousand. While we are cost competitive, we deliver only the highest quality products to our customers. Additionally, we have experience in handling a board level product and system level products that involve box builds. We also handle any custom cables, packaging, and contents that go along in the final packaging. We can ship a fully functional product directly to your distribution center if you so require.

Offshore Production:
Whizz Systems also have Tier 2 offshore partnerships when our customers require higher volume production to hit the required price points and end customer needs. We are able to achieve quality and minimize offshore risks due to our dedicated offshore QC and technical support team, which remain absolutely seamless to you. We address the over all product-build plan during the design phase, and refine the design accordingly. Thus, achieving the best yields, meanwhile lowering overall cost.

TEST:

Test is a very important aspect of successful product launch, and that is why we pay special attention to the test details during the design phase. During the design phase, we will maximize the test point coverage, and give you're the report of all the nets that are not being covered, so that we can cover those nets in functional test.

We have several testing options in-house, and will offer you the right choice depending on your product plan. Following are some of the test options that we offer :

Flying Prone Test:
We have a brand new Seica S40 Pilot LX Tester in-house. It is an extra large flying probe system well-suited to testing any type of electrical board on any type of production run from a single board to high volume. The 24”x24” board area is particularly suited to larger PCB’s. Our tester features full suite of test capabilities ranging from simple MDA testing of passive components through complete, powered up in-circuit and functional analog tests, static and dynamic digital tests and vectorless testing, boundary scan and custom techniques, and OpenFix vectorless testing methods. The system is equipped with two high resolution CCD cameras for performing tasks such as automatic centering of the board, optical inspection of component placement and the creation of digitized images of the UUT. The advantage of flying probe test is that it has a small upfront NRE expense, because it does not require a test fixture. The disadvantage is that it takes longer than ICT test, so the test cost per board is higher than ICT test. We will recommend the right test plan based on your build quantities.

ICT Test:
For high volume production runs, this is the correct choice. We will develop the program and fixture for all of your ICT test requirements. Although the NRE expense on this test is much higher, the ROI for production boards will be easily shown when you compare the speed and cost per board than that of the Flying Probe.

Functional Test:
With the engineering capability to develop a functional test for your product, we have a proven track record doing this for many of our customers or we can utilize your own. Our Functional test plans range from simple GO/NO-GO test to very detailed testing where each register and each function is tested with memory read-writes. We will provide you these detailed test results to further improve your future yields of the same product or product family. We can also automate the test setup to improve the test efficiency and lower your test cost.

Burn-In:
We also offer burn-in services. Burn-In can be a simple power on burn-in to temperature cycling and stress test.

REWORK:

We support all of your rework requirements on quick turn basis. During the board debug, we routinely support our customer requests for the following items:

• BGA removal, and mounting
• Cuts/jumps
• Incrementally populating/depopulating the boards
• Custom adaptors to address different pin-outs
• SMT/TH Components soldering/desoldering

In addition to the above items, we have provided some creative solutions to our customers rework needs.

With full service turnkey proto setup in house, we offer you a one stop solution for all of your PCB fabrication, PCB Assembly, and material procurement requirements. Although we offer a complete solution, yet we offer the flexibility to engage with us at any level.