From Gerber to Production: Inside Our 48-Hour Turnaround
How we get bare boards out the door in 48 hours — automation, partner factories, and where the constraints actually live.
Layer-Up Engineering·4/27/2026"Two-day PCB prototyping" sounds like marketing. Here's the actual workflow.
Hour 0: Quote and upload
Customer hits the calculator. Engine returns price in <300ms. Customer drops a Gerber zip; our worker validates, runs DRC sanity, and fingerprints the design.
Hour 2: Engineering review
Borderline specs (sub-4 mil traces, sub-0.2 mm holes) get human eyes. 90% pass without changes.
Hour 6: Factory dispatch
Routing rules push the order to the partner factory matching layers + material + finish. They get a spec PDF + Gerbers in the format they prefer.
Hour 36: Quality check
AOI + electrical test on every board. We pull a 100% bring-up sample for boards above $200 BOM value.
Hour 48: Pickup
DHL pickup at 18:00 China time. ~3 days to most of the world.