Publication date: 03 April 2008
I recently visited a mid-sized contract manufacturer. I’ll tell you, walking through a modern SMT facility today is an awesome experience.
The facility was well-lit and the noise level seemed more subdued than in past years. There were relatively few operators and technicians at the production lines.
Those that were there, however, calmly tended to the automated machines that assemble electronics in an efficient and precise manner.
This automation is designed to produce the required quality with the lowest attainable production cost, and it does a great job of it. Just as we approached the end of the production line, however, this picture of competence suddenly shattered.
At that moment I spotted a stressed out technician carrying a profiler with thermocouples attached to a PCB. She then proceeded to stop the production flow through the reflow oven before putting the profiler and PCB on the conveyor in order to run a manual profile.
Due to the “black box” characteristics of reflow ovens, information on the process that the PCBs are exposed to is not accessible without further “investigation.”
This investigation today typically requires manual spot checks, which immediately bring two negative concepts to mind as far as electronic production is concerned:
• Manual implies expensive, inaccurate and non-repeatable, not to mention interruption to the production flow.• Spot checks imply that production runs blind all the time except during the actual check.
Now, this may sound strange coming from a guy that makes a living selling profilers, but it is time to bring the thermal process up to par with the rest of the production line by eliminating these daily or weekly profile runs. Today the thermal processes (reflow, curing, wave solder, selective, vapor phase) represent the “missing link” between last century’s production lines peppered with manual tasks, and this century’s high-efficiency operations.
The answer is automation. Whether users want to know if their profile is in spec once a week, once a day or once a second, or whether they want to know the health of their thermal process before trouble starts, the technology to achieve this automatically is proven and inexpensive. It is akin to having thousands of thermal profilers in a factory with thermocouples (TCs) attached to each and every production board while the collected data is “beamed” to the manufacturer’s PC.
Any out-of-spec situation will instantly shut down the conveyor until the process has been adjusted. Best of all, the systems run in the background without user intervention and with no interruption to production, thereby yielding both quality and productivity improvements.
Now, some may argue that running a manual profile once a week per oven is adequate, and it does not really affect the productivity. Just as the introduction of fine pitch technologies helped drive improvements and automation to the screen printing, pick & place and AOI processes over the last two decades, lead-free products with their tighter process windows are now driving the automation in the thermal processes.
My experience after visiting hundreds of electronic manufacturers is that there is way too much rework and touch-up going on in the average factory, while the production flow is frequently interrupted. Whatever contribution the thermal process makes to defects (both yield and warranty costs) as well as production down-time, automated profiling systems can all but eliminate. My thoughts are shared by a fast growing number of customers that now demand improved thermal processes.
In today’s climate of rising costs, intense competition and poor lead-free product quality, it is time to eliminate last century’s reliance on manual spot checks in the thermal process. Implementing automation will reap the benefits of improved quality, reduced production cost and, above all, happier customers.
Bjorn Dahle was promoted to the position of President of Company in 2000. Dahle had worked for KIC for four years, in the positions of Vice President of Sales and Vice President of Sales and Marketing. Previously, he was Director of European Operations, and then a Regional Sales Manager, for MPM. Prior to that, he was a Product Manager for Amistar. Dahle earned a degree in Mechanical Engineering in his native Norway, and has an MBA degree from San Diego State University
