I would be interested, but can't promise to purchase at this time. If you could swing the dollars and there's enough interest to justify it, the more you order, the lower the piece price. Maybe you could get 50 for $650? Also, you might shop around a little (if you haven't already). A year or two ago I saw a PCB outfit out of Belarus or somesuch that made PCBs dirt-cheap. Never used them though.
Also, I found out the hard way some time back what factors are the main cost drivers in PCB manufacture. We had a backplane design that was 19"x5" and got prototypes (3 or 4 IIRC) that wound up costing about $55 each. I called the PCB folks and asked them why they were so expensive and what I could do to bring the price down. He said the odd size (19" long) required that they stop the manufacture in the middle of the process to rotate the material in the machine. I redesigned it to shave 3" off and managed to cut the price by about 1/3.
The main cost drivers, most costly first, are (please correct any errors I may make here):
- any manual operations (like that repositioning thing I mentioned)
- Number of layers > 2
- number of holes/vias
- amount of material used.
Of course, custom requirements like copper thicker than one oz, special materials, complicated cutouts/shape, odd/non-standard tool sizes, very small features (IIRC 8 mils is the standard min feature size) will affect the end price.
You might talk to your PCB house and ask them what, if anything, you could do to lower the price.
Funny, the daughter boards that plugged into that backplane had to be redone. The first batch were flawless per the design but for one little thing. The crappy old DOS-based Tango software I was using didn't have a pattern for a 68 pin PLCC socket in its library, so I very carefully, painstakingly created one... that was backward. IOW, to make it work, I had to solder the socket on the 'wrong' side of the board. Hard to hide that one; even a novice could see that it wasn't right.
Bummer.
