

The hardware renaissance is real — and no one is feeling it more than the shops building the prototypes that power it. In this episode of the CTRL+Listen Podcast, host James Sweetlove sits down with Amir Roy, VP of New Business Development at Imagineering Inc. (pcbnet.com), a family-owned PCB fabrication and assembly shop founded in 1985. Amir shares what 40 years of bootstrapped manufacturing looks like from the inside — and why the timing has never been better for hardware builders.
From quick-turn prototyping and stencilless assembly to DFM checks, global supply chain strategy, and the surge of VC money flooding back into hard tech, Amir breaks down how Imagineering has survived chip shortages, COVID, and tariff shocks — and why he believes we're on the precipice of a full hardware renaissance. If you're building hardware, sourcing PCBs, or just watching the electronics manufacturing space, this conversation is essential listening.
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James Sweetlove: Hey everyone, this is James from the CTRL+Listen Podcast, brought to you by Octopart. I've got a special guest for you today. This is Amir Roy, VP of new business development at Imagineering, Inc. Thank you so much for coming on the show, Amir. Great to have you.
Amir Roy: Hey, James. Thanks for having me.
James Sweetlove: Anytime. We actually met at DesignCon, though, which is kind of cool. You're one of the first guests I've met in person before we actually did the show. So, yeah, we can talk about that a little later. Do you want to start by telling us a little bit about your story and background and the company's story?
Amir Roy: Yeah, sure. My name is Amir Roy. I'm the VP of new business development at Imagineering. I got my start in an odd way for engineering. I started at a company called Sunny and Ash, where they specialized in AR, VR, and renderings for the real estate development industry. I got my start there. I helped with sales and marketing, and I stayed there up until they actually sold, at which point I got the call from my family business, Imagineering, to come work there and help out with their sales. So, new business development, partnerships, strategy, trade shows like the one that we met at, and yeah, I've been there for the past eight years and just growing and chugging along.
James Sweetlove: Oh, that's awesome. So do you want to tell us a little bit about the company? What does Imagineering Inc. do?
Amir Roy: Yeah, we were founded in 1985. So, we're coming up on 40 years in business, and we were founded in Elk Grove Village, Illinois. We started out as a PCB fab shop, and fast forward to today, we offer full turnkey manufacturing. So PCB fab, PCB assembly, we'll source the components for you. We're really a one-stop shop for our customers, from quick-turn prototypes through to mid-volume production.
We've seen it all. We've served over 12,000 customers across 480,000 jobs and delivered over 90 million individual pieces. So that's Imagineering in a nutshell. We're led by our CEO, Khurrum Dhanji, and our executive team, who have grown us to the company that we are today.
James Sweetlove: That's awesome. Really cool. I think you might be one of the first few guests we've had on the show that's actually operating in a family-owned business. I know we've had one or two before, but it's not as common as it used to be. Can you tell us a little bit about the realities of actually operating a family-owned business space in 2026?
Amir Roy: Yeah, it's very unique, and I'm sure you've seen in today's manufacturing landscape, it's full of private equity rollups and VC-backed startups that are coming into the industry now. Like I said, we started in 1985. We bootstrapped from day one. So, family-owned business, never took any outside money.
The advantages to that are when you work with us, we stand behind our work. We pick up the phone. You have direct access to decision makers, and we celebrate wins together as a family. It's very much a family culture at Imagineering.
The challenges, I would say, are that you are competing with companies with deeper pockets, right? So you have to be scrappy. You have to be deliberate in the services you offer, and you have to be flexible for your customers. But because of all those things, it's allowed us to survive these catastrophic events in manufacturing, such as COVID, chip shortages, tariffs, and things like that.
Having a family-owned business that really stands behind its work, is flexible, can shift on a dime, is transparent, and at the same time loves to work has allowed us to really survive all those events and thrive right after.
James Sweetlove: Yeah. I mean, from my perspective, what I've seen of smaller businesses, especially ones that are family-owned, is you don't have to run anything up the pole. So if you want to make a decision to change something or try something, there's no red tape coming up from above. It's just, hey, let's do this. And if you can prove that it works, then you just keep doing it, which is awesome. It gives you a lot of flexibility and agility.
Amir Roy: Absolutely. I mean, everyone's incentives are aligned, and everyone's values are aligned as people. So we're able to make decisions on a dime and communicate with our customers. Because we have this long tail of customers that we've worked with, it's given us a lot of freedom to make decisions, knowing that even if I'm on a call with a customer, I have the backing from the executives to make these quick decisions that really help our customer, especially in this NPI, quick-turn prototype landscape that's like, I needed it yesterday, type of environment.
James Sweetlove: Exactly. It very much suits what you're doing.
Amir Roy: For sure.
James Sweetlove: So, speaking of prototypes, I know that's a massive part of what you do. Can you tell us a little bit about what prototypes are like these days? I know the industry is constantly shifting and changing.
Amir Roy: Yeah, I mean, prototyping, if you think about it, is the backbone of all innovation. If you are sitting at home and you're looking at your desk and you see multiple electronic devices there, before they got there, they started as prototypes. So at some point, whoever manufactured that for the mass market started with a shop like Imagineering, where they took their initial Gerber and their BOM to us, and they iterated through some revs to get it to where it could go to mass production.
Because of that, we understand that we're the foundation for good manufacturing practices. We're the backbone. We're the foundation. If the prototype is not well done and you can't iterate through revs correctly, or your file set is messed up, and you go to mass production, that electronic device never gets to your desk.
And so we at Imagineering understand that the best value add that we can give is preparing our customers for mass production. We've done this for so long that large CMs who are publicly traded actually come to us for their quick-turn prototypes. What they'll do is have customers, for example, who don't meet their minimum order quantity. So they'll take on that customer, outsource it to us, have us do the quick-turn prototype up until a certain volume, and then in-house that again.
I think because of that, we have this breadth of knowledge when it comes to quick-turn prototyping, but it's evolving rapidly, like you mentioned. The way that we see it evolving is really on the speed front.
When I first started at Imagineering, a one-week or two-week turn was quick turn. That was industry standard. Now we have customers coming to us and saying, "Hey, we needed it yesterday." So we've evolved from that to what it is today, where we can offer 24-to-48-hour lead times. We're fabbing it one day, then we're doing the assembly in the next two or three days. So we may be able to get you a full turnkey job within three to four days, which, if you would have told me when I first started, we were already doing it in two weeks and we thought that was fast.
Now we see where this is headed, where it's going to be really, really quick. The quality has to follow along with that. And with prototyping, as everyone knows, for the manufacturer, the goal is always reduced revisions, fewer revs, faster time to market, and lower development cost. That's where we're headed.
James Sweetlove: So what impact, if any at all, has additive manufacturing had on prototyping? Is that a game changer in some ways?
Amir Roy: What's interesting is we've seen it have a significant impact on housings, casings, and fixtures. These things have allowed our customers to iterate on their prototypes faster and accelerate the overall product development. But when it comes to the PCB and PCB assembly, we have not seen it impact us to that extent. You can't 3D-print a 30-layer HDI board with controlled impedance, right?
But I like to say you don't get hit by a bus you see coming. So as long as we at Imagineering have our fingers on the pulse here and we're following that additive manufacturing market closely, we won't be caught flat-footed when things really start to take off, which I think they will eventually. I'm not in denial here, but when they do, we can be ahead of it enough to where we may buy those machines and then offer that service to our customers and speed up the whole process, and maybe get to those 24-hour full turnkey turns.
James Sweetlove: Right. Yeah. It's one of those things about not resisting change, but embracing and employing it. We'll get into this more because I know you want to talk about the AI side of things, but it's a similar mindset where if there's a tool that can make your life easier and give you more capabilities, why would you fight it instead of incorporating it into what you already do?
Amir Roy: Absolutely. Why fight change, right? I think we saw this, too, with globalization. A lot of people were fighting that, and they missed out on the opportunity to diversify their supply chain and go overseas. Whereas we at Imagineering were like, if we can't beat them, join them, right? We have a facility in Taiwan. We have USA fab and assembly, but we also have Taiwan fab, and so we offer that service to our customers.
We have partnerships overseas as well, where we can utilize this globalized supply chain to really do everything in such a way that gives the best value add to our customers and also de-risks their supply chain. So yeah, don't fight change. I think embrace it, and that's how you can survive like we have for over 40 years.
James Sweetlove: For sure. And it's interesting what you said about the globalization thing because that's completely changed. My whole mindset regarding that since COVID has been that everyone kind of put their eggs in one basket in some places and then realized, okay, just because this has always been great in the past doesn't mean it always will be. Maybe I should have a backup plan in some other countries, or some stuff manufactured locally and some stuff overseas. So yeah, that space has been changing consistently for the last six years now.
Amir Roy: Yeah, for sure. I've always said the hybrid model is what's going to win. We're inherently more global today than we were yesterday, and we're trending towards becoming completely democratized when it comes to fab and assembly across the world. You're not going to look for where it's being made at some point in the future.
Right now, I think it's a little bit more of a hot-button issue, but in the future, it's not going to matter where your job is being done, as long as it's done to the right quality standards and whoever's doing it for you can communicate with you about any changes they made throughout the process and keep you updated in a timely manner, because that's all that matters at the end of the day.
Right now, when it comes to ITAR defense work, it's a different story. It has to be in the US. We're not moving that stuff. We have our USA anchor facility here in the US, so none of that's going to change. But when it comes to everything else, yes, don't fight it.
James Sweetlove: For sure. So I want to take a step back a little bit and look at a broader concept with the company. The two main spaces that you described when we spoke were PCB fabrication capabilities and assembly capabilities. So most people know what that is, but just kind of explain the difference between those two capabilities and how they intersect.
Amir Roy: Sure. At Imagineering, we really have two sides of our business: PCB fab and PCB assembly. In order to do the assembly, we need the fabs, right? So we start with the fabs at the raw-board level. There's no components on there.
What we specialize in is rigid, rigid-flex, and full-flex PCB fab. We have standard materials that we use, but we can also get exotic for different use cases. So we have Rogers materials, Megtron, aluminum, and then we can source other materials for you as well.
We do a lot of HDI work, so high layer count, blind/buried vias, 2.5 mil trace/space. We can also do really heavy copper, like four or five ounces plus. Everything we do is Class 2 standard, but we can do Class 3 as well. We can do ITAR work. We can do AS9100 aerospace work. We are ISO 9001 certified and AS9100 certified as well.
That's us on the fab side. Quick-turn prototyping is really our bread and butter up until medium volume. On the assembly side, we have an in-house sourcing team, so we're able to source the components for you. All they do all day, all night, is source components. So we try to get the best deals for our customers, as well as find alternatives.
As you know, with chip shortages and things like that, it's been really important to get your ducks in order before you even get to the prototype level, because when you go to mass production, if there's a component that's out of stock, all of a sudden you have to revamp your whole file set around what's available.
We saw this all throughout COVID. So our team is really great at finding alternatives and helping you get to a point in your BOM where you don't have to worry about things being unavailable.
In addition, on the assembly side, something that makes us super unique is that we have a stencilless process. Typically, when you work with a CM, they will have you buy the stencil, which costs money and takes time to build. What we have is a machine in-house that specializes in spitting the solder paste directly onto the pads.
It's very unique. Because we do the high-mix, low-volume, this is really optimized for that. We don't have to switch stencils between fabs or things like that, and so that's something that's super unique about us.
We have inline AOI, X-ray, RF testing, and functional testing. We're pumping out close to 20 different part numbers a day out of these. So we're really used to just turning over jobs quickly so that, since we have no minimum order quantity, your one-piece job can fly off that line and we can get the next one going right after.
James Sweetlove: That's awesome. Facility-wise, I know that you obviously have your own, but you also have partner facilities to do this work. Can you tell us a little bit more about that and the partnerships that you have?
Amir Roy: Yeah, so our main facility is in Elk Grove Village, Illinois. That's kind of like our anchor facility. We have another facility in Fort Worth, Texas, and a facility in Taiwan. But in addition to that, we have, like I alluded to earlier, this diverse supply chain network that spans globally.
That's really allowed us to stay in business for as long as we have and pivot based on any issues within the supply chain. It gives our customers the ability to sleep at night knowing that no matter what's happening geopolitically within the supply chains, any natural disaster, it doesn't matter. We are going to deliver the job on time, within our quality standards, because we have not only our own facilities as anchor facilities, but then we have this supply chain network that we've vetted over 40 years of battle-testing.
We've actually grown with them, and they've grown with us. It's this great relationship that we've had that our customers can really take advantage of when they use us.
James Sweetlove: That's awesome. There was something else that we spoke about that you offer as DFM checks. Can you tell us a little bit about what that means?
Amir Roy: Yeah, so DFM stands for design for manufacturability. Basically, it just ensures that the file set that you provide us with is manufacturable. There's no shorts, violations, or glaringly obvious things that would be a full stop on the manufacturing side.
We catch most of them in the quoting process. So most of them, by the time we get to the PO phase, are solved. But then after we get the PO, that's where we start a really deep DFM check, where our CAD team basically goes in and rips apart everything just to make sure that it is manufacturable and there's nothing that's going to kill the job mid-manufacturing.
We usually keep this really simple, really quick. If we have any questions or anything like that, we build that into our lead time, but there's no additional charge for anything like this. It's really quick and easy to get through for most of our customers because, like I said, during the quoting phase, we sort out most of the things.
But it's really important because on the NPI side, you want to get it right the first time. Reduce revisions. That's the name of the game. And so we can iron out a lot of this stuff in the DFM check. It may reduce the amount of revisions you have and get your files organized in such a way where, when you go to mass manufacturing, you're ready and confident.
James Sweetlove: Obviously, it depends on where your customer is based and operating and what you have to check, I imagine. For EU customers, you'd have a lot more regulations you have to comply with. I imagine you have to do a whole other layer of checks in that space versus the US.
Amir Roy: Yeah, sometimes. I think for us, a lot of times we see our customers tell us what we should be looking for if there's any worries upfront. But at the same time, yeah, if we're dealing with a European country, we know it's most likely going to be RoHS, right? We're not going to use a leaded finish or use leaded assembly. We're going to try to switch to a RoHS-type finish that meets their requirements. So these are things that, obviously, sometimes they don't know, and we'll just correct them during the quoting.
James Sweetlove: Okay. That's great. So I want to take a step away from the company for a minute and talk about some of the bigger-picture concepts that you and I discussed in the last call when we spoke. One of the major ones we spoke about, and I still find this fascinating, is the fact that we've seen a return to focus on hardware over software in recent years.
Obviously, both have always been important, but you did have a period there where software was the be-all and end-all of becoming an engineer at some point. We've really seen a pivot back, since robotics and AI, to putting importance again on manufacturing. This is an exciting space again. It's innovative again. So I know you have some insights in that area. I'd love to hear your thoughts on this.
Amir Roy: Yeah, it's amazing, man. I think when we talked last, I was so excited about it, and my excitement has only grown since then.
Obviously, we met at DesignCon, but prior to that, I went to CES earlier this year in January, which, for those who are listening, is this massive show in Vegas that they do every year. It's the Consumer Electronics Show, so all things electronics typically happen at CES, and they kind of set the stage for the rest of the year.
This year was one of the first years, I want to say since 2018, where I walked away and I was like, "Whoa, hardware is back." I remember two years ago when I went to Eureka Park, which is this area of CES where it's all startups. When I went there, I want to say 40% of the companies at a hardware show were software companies. When I went back this year, 95% were all hardware.
I think this was because I was seeing AI, wearables, robotics, and then defense and aerospace companies. It's amazing. I haven't seen this energy since the IoT era. It's incredible, and I think it's mostly because of AI. AI is now bleeding into hardware.
The money is flowing back into hardware as well. Simultaneously, I think that VCs and private equity firms have realized that software doesn't have a moat anymore. You can spin up something somewhat workable with Claude Code or Codex compared to a lot of these large Fortune 500 SaaS companies, and you can't do that in hardware yet. There are so many moats. There's so much complexity.
You can do everything right. I've had customers who have done everything right, and then a supply chain mishap happens, a chip shortage occurs, or a geopolitical event like tariffs happens, and all of a sudden, they're put in a bind. Because of that, there's so much complexity. It's really hard to disrupt that industry, even with AI.
I think that VCs are understanding this, and they're funding, and the money is flowing back into hardware. I was at an event last week, a hard-tech event, and bumped into a few VCs. I haven't seen that ever. I'm like, "What are you guys doing here?"
James Sweetlove: I bumped into one or two at DesignCon as well. They were there as well.
Amir Roy: Yeah. So did I. A lot of guys were going booth to booth trying to buy different guys.
James Sweetlove: Oh, this is a good sign.
Amir Roy: Yeah, these are the guys you want because it's good. I think it's good for our industry, too, because it pushes everyone forward, right? Being a family-owned business, you see that and you see the rollups happen, and you see them all integrate AI and things like that, which is great, but it forces us to do that, too, and stay ahead of the game.
I was talking to someone recently within our industry, and they're like, "Is this temporary? Is this here to stay?" Just because being in manufacturing, you're so used to getting beat up that anytime it's slightly optimistic, you're like, I don't know about this.
But I assured that person. I said, look, this is not temporary. If you follow the money, if you simply follow the money, you'll realize that we're on the precipice of a hardware renaissance.
I just saw, I think it was last week, that Jeff Bezos announced this hundred-billion-dollar fund to acquire manufacturing companies and transform them with AI.
James Sweetlove: Yep. I think I saw that. Yeah.
Amir Roy: It was ridiculous. And then I saw Musk recently come out and say we're going to have two humanoid robots for every single human on the planet.
What is going on? These are very bold statements from the titans of our industry, right? And they're not just saying this; they're putting their money where their mouth is. I think that when the capital is committed, the demand is structural. It's here to stay.
So I'm really excited about the next 12 to 18 months, and I think the coming years, for not just hardware but manufacturing as a whole.
James Sweetlove: Yeah. And I think the other thing that's important is we've had a shortage for so long of hardware designers that it's been gradually growing as well. I feel like this is a point in time where people are excited again about hardware. I think it's going to actually bring people back to the well, aspiring young people to the industry who are excited to be working on robotics, unmanned aerial vehicles. It's exciting stuff. It's not just your standard manufacturing. It's the future.
Amir Roy: For sure. Half my X feed, or Twitter feed, whatever you want to call it today, is hardware engineering. It's guys who used to work in software as software engineers who are now tinkering with hardware again. It's crazy to see because I've been shouting about this stuff from the rooftops for so long, and now I'm starting to see all these guys who I follow on Twitter shifting their priorities to hardware. It's really beautiful to see, man. I think it's great.
Even at DesignCon, I started to see young kids again come to the show.
James Sweetlove: Yeah, exactly. That's for sure. There were a lot of them.
Amir Roy: Whereas before, I think if I saw a young kid at the show when I first started, I'd be like, "What are you doing here, buddy? You need to go to software. It's a lot greener over there." But now I'm like, "No, no, no. Hardware. We need more people in hardware." I'm really happy that I'm seeing it happen.
James Sweetlove: For sure. Especially because, as I mentioned before, that growing shortage has been a concern for a very long time, and there wasn't really anything in place to do anything about it. It was like, "Oh, yeah, we'll fix it somehow." But not much was actually happening. I think it's going to naturally correct to an extent because innovation is here. Opportunity is here.
Amir Roy: Yeah, for sure. Speaking of shortages, I remember a time when I would be helping a customer with their build, and we'd get the PO in the morning. We'd try to purchase the component. We'd look in the morning when we got the PO, and all the components were available. By the end of the day, when we tried to place the order for the components, half of them were out of stock.
It was just a ridiculous time. So for us to come out the other end of that now and see components in stock and see the energy come back at the same time, it's the perfect timing. It's like multiple S-curves of innovation happening at the same time that are aligning perfectly.
Now I'm confident that if you're prototyping now, in the next six to 12 months, when you hit mass production as a product, you will be set from a supply chain perspective to be successful. Whereas I couldn't say that during COVID. I couldn't say that even after COVID. But now, in the last, I want to say, 18 months, I can confidently say that if you're thinking about building something or you're tinkering, now is the time to pull the trigger.
James Sweetlove: Okay. Well, that's exciting. So, speaking of trends in the prototyping space, I wanted to ask you, are there any emerging trends that people should be looking for with prototyping and fabrication that you've noticed personally?
Amir Roy: When it comes to trends in prototyping, I'm just seeing speed increase. I'm seeing nothing crazy, to be honest. There's no trends that are worth pursuing right now. Within prototyping, I would just say from a fab and assembly perspective, quick-turn stuff is what I'm seeing.
Agility, I think, right now because of tariffs and supply chain shock. So going to someone where you'll pay a little bit extra, but you'll get better quality. I think from a prototyping perspective, and this is my spicy take that I gave you earlier, I see a lot of people from a manufacturing perspective trying to build out their local supply chains. So they're investing back into onshoring a lot of their products.
My take on that is I think long term, if you're going to be a profitable manufacturer, you need to be global. You need to have a balanced supply chain because, inherently, if you're fully local, if you're fully manufacturing things locally, it's highly risky, and you're not going to be competitive when it comes to cost. If you're doing it fully outsourced or you're doing it fully overseas, it's highly risky there, too.
But if you have this balance between the two, or maybe you're doing the fab overseas and doing the assembly here, or vice versa, or you have it evenly distributed throughout geographic areas, you are rock solid from a prototyping perspective. So that's the main trend that I see that I think a lot of people need to understand.
It's great that we're trying to bring manufacturing back to the USA, but if you are a consumer that's building with a manufacturer, make sure that they have a diversified supply chain because what you don't want to happen is to be caught flat-footed if there's some type of political event or some type of risk.
We have a lot of PE rollups. We have a lot of VC-backed companies. Sometimes they're subsidizing those costs of making things in-house or making things within the US with that VC money. When that VC money dries up, you don't want your CM to go out of business.
So with that being said, I think a lot of CMs need to diversify their supply chain so that they can survive long term and be profitable. That's the way you thrive in this industry. That's how we survived for so long, right? We aimed at being profitable first, and then once the profitability occurred, that's when we were like, okay, let's get risky.
But I think a lot of the new CMs that are coming into the industry don't have that understanding yet. I hope that they learn that having a diversified supply chain for prototyping is something that's going to help you survive long term.
James Sweetlove: Yeah. I think the other thing is we have accepted by now that the industry is unpredictable. It's not necessarily the industry's fault, but there are a lot of external factors we just have no control over. They've been happening one after the other for years now. Whether it's the pandemic, a regional crisis, or tariffs, it's always something lately. It's not how it used to be. It's not smooth sailing like it was.
I mean, a lot of people have found a way, like you said. You have to just work around that. But I think if you're not, and you're kind of trying to do things the old way and not adjusting to change, then you're going to get left behind.
Amir Roy: Yeah. You have to be flexible in today's environment, and you can't rely on a single source, unfortunately. It's crazy. Like you said, it's just back-to-back. When you have a slow period where there's no news, I get nervous. I'm like, something's coming.
James Sweetlove: What's next? Exactly.
Amir Roy: Yeah. So it's really beneficial for manufacturers and then OEMs, or people who are just looking to build hardware, to understand that it's never smooth sailing. But at the same time, if you have a good manufacturer and you have a good file set, you can really go anywhere and pivot quickly.
James Sweetlove: Exactly. Well, thank you so much for your time. It's been an awesome discussion. What you do is so necessary, but also it's just exciting. You're involved in so many cool projects on a regular basis, and you pivot so quickly. So thanks for the discussion. Last question is, if people want to learn more about the company or get in touch, what is the best way to do that?
Amir Roy: Yeah, so the best way to get in contact with us at Imagineering is to go to our website. It is www.pcbnet.com. And you can reach out to us at sales@pcbnet.com.
If you have any questions, let me know. We'd love to help, no matter what process you're in when it comes to NPI. Reach out to us, even if it's early and you don't even have your file set ready. We'll help you out.
James Sweetlove: Awesome. And if people want to contact you directly, is LinkedIn the best way to find you and connect with you?
Amir Roy: Yeah, find me on LinkedIn. Amir Roy. If you have any questions, shoot me a DM. Happy to help. Get on a call and talk you through what we're seeing.
James Sweetlove: Awesome. And we will include links to your website, your personal LinkedIn, and the company's profile as well in the description of the video. So if anyone's looking for that, you can find that there.
Amir Roy: Perfect.
James Sweetlove: Thanks, Amir. It's been awesome talking with you, and I really appreciate your time.
Amir Roy: Yeah, thanks for having me, James.
James Sweetlove: Anytime. Everyone listening, thank you so much for tuning in. Next week, we'll have another guest for you.