How/where are people getting their PCBs manufactured and assembled? Are cheap chinese services reliable? How do you protect your IP when using manufacturing services?
If you are putting your secret sauce in the PCB, you’ve already lost. Doesn’t matter if your board is one later or twenty.
Your secret IP had better not be your circuit board. That’s a losing proposition.
But then, that's something culturally almost impossible to even imagine from people who hark from the HW design world.
Sounds like an easy way to get others to do your work for you for free. Win win. Why go through the hassle of establishing a supply chain. So what's the catch? Why are we still labouring instead of waiting for our products to magically ship themselves through Aliexpress?
Never seen my IP show up anywhere but it's generally not very interesting to begin with :P
It's all about trust.
However, they're REALLY prickly about fabricating PCBs with lower tolerances (e.g. drills or cuts too close to PCB edges), and often refuse to fabricate them. I use ALLPCB in those cases.
As my designs are small hobbyist projects just for myself I don't really care about potential IP issues.
2. Protecting your IP with your PCB design isn't something you can really do. Any PCB can be reverse engineered very easily. Besides, if you're asking this question on a random internet forum, I have to doubt you have any serious IP to worry about.