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www.us-tech.com
February, 2013
Tomorrow’s SMT Placement Platform Is Here Now
By Bernhard Fritz, ASM Assembly Systems, LLC
place ever smaller components in great numbers in established pro - cesses. Equipment makers tried to leapfrog each other in terms of machine speed and performance. But electronics manufacturing
F
has changed. With today’s smaller lot sizes, they have no time to gradually ramp up their processes in many iter- ations. In the future, precision will mean perfection from the first board on. The concept of speed is also chang- ing. In the past it referred exclusively to placement time. Other process steps were ignored, because they hardly mattered in the overall mass production context. In the future, mixed model production will become more common. The entire build process from data import, placement program creation and production scheduling all the way to production and delivery will have to be executed right-first-time and at high speed.
Consistent NPI Tools Let’s look at the NPI process,
for example: As lot sizes get smaller, the NPI process is becoming dramat- ically more important on the produc- tion floor. Placement machines like the SIPLACE SX from ASM Assembly Systems offer a series of
Feeder dolly makes changes quick and easy.
uct data in a wide range of formats. One special feature: Since the
software assumes that the data will have to be modified in order to be usable, it helps the user to discover
tion, new components can be quickly described — either offline or online. Even placement sequences made nec- essary by the board’s geometry (PoPs, large components casting “shadows”,
or many years, the ideal place- ment machine consisted of fast hardware that would be able to
innovative software tools that accel- erate new product introduction; they are able to accept and visualize prod-
and correct errors. That way, missing components or faulty positions can be reliably recognized and fixed. In addi-
etc.) can be specified and instantly made part of the placement program. Once the placement program is
complete, the user can verify it with SIPLACE Virtual Product Build in order to detect errors long before the first board enters the line. Since all these process steps can be performed offline, they will not reduce the pro- duction equipment’s performance. Another requirement: When produc- ing small lots with consigned materi- als or prototypes with a finite num- ber of components, it is critically important that the placement system is capable of “right-first-time” manu- facturing. To accomplish this, place- ment platforms of the future will have to be able to debug programs offline, as well as programming in last-minute parts on the machine in the middle of running a board.
Setup Efficiency Mixed model production will
drive manufacturers to come up with more creative setup and changeover concepts to remain efficient, despite the increasing numbers of change - overs they will need to do. The SIPLACE SX delivers on these needs; changeover tables can be vir- tually split to reserve a fixed portion for the production of setup families. The remaining table portions can
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