AP Circuits

General information

AP Circuits was opened in 1984 to address the needs of it's founders: "Prototype quantities for reasonable price and delivery". The vendors of the day were not able to produce boards at a price all developers and enthusiasts could afford. Engineers faced difficult choices with time and budgets (so what's new right?), with each design and revision costing thousands to produce. Wire-wrap and layout tape were the common items on an engineer's desktop.

Layouts were often masterful works of "art" and forethought. "PCB-Art" departments were stand-alone in many companies of the day. Layer artwork was done by hand, usually at 4x scale, using light tables, background grids taped to the glass, and vellum overlaying the grid. Each adhesive trace and pad painstakingly placed and trimmed by hobby-knife on the vellum. Each layer requiring another sheet of vellum layered over the previous while keeping it in registration without moving the adhesive traces stuck to the sheet below. The adhesives had a tendency to sweat resin onto the upper sheet. Needless to say the layout and proofing were delicate steps.

With art approval in place, a photographic reduction of each vellum sheet was done by a line camera to create the master film. The layer films were then delivered to the board shop where the pad-master film was digitized by manual "bomb sight" optical encoding for hole locations and routing. The intense manual effort involved in design and fabrication of the early PCBs were the reason for the common sight of cut traces and jumper wires on production boards. It was simply too resource intensive to correct.

The PC changed everything in the blink of an eye. CAD systems were replacing entire art departments along with the associated line camera photography. Needless to say PC's eliminated many manual and detail-intensive art/data management issues involved moving a circuit board design from vellum and into physical reality.

AP Circuits capitalized on newly emerging personal computer technology, developing our own custom CAM software to interpret the multiple variances CAD systems of the day produced. We were the very first, inexpensive, quick-turn, commercial prototyping facility in the world. Hundreds of thousands of designs have passed through our doors and some are still serving ongoing roles in the vastness of space!

In our 30+ years of service engineering teams have supported our facility and schooled our personnel in countless ways. It's people just like you who have helped us build the reputation as the "go to guys" when the pressure is really on. Thanks to people just like you we continue to learn and mature as a team. Your recommendations have been instrumental in refining our infrastructure and development of the services we offer today!