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www.us-tech.com
July, 2014
XetaWave Achieves Advanced SMT Production With SIPLACE SX By Mark Ogden, Marketing Manager, ASM Assembly Systems
Customers of XetaWave demand high reliability and robust data transmis- sion in support of mission critical applications. With these stringent requirements in hand, the company went about selecting equipment for its production line to be installed in its production facility. Here, quality and reliability were just two of the reasons why the choice was two SIPLACE SX machines as the place- ment solution. Now, all XetaWave radios are
X
100 percent designed, manufactured, and tested at its headquarters in Louisville, Colorado. XetaWave was co-founded in
2010 by Jonathan Sawyer, an indus- try renowned pioneer in wireless tech- nology, and Robert Campbell, a tech- nology entrepreneur. With such a high emphasis on quality and reliabil- ity, the choice of manufacturing equipment is critical. When asked about manufacturing these radios, Jonathan Sawyer, Chief Executive Officer (CEO) and Chief Technical Officer (CTO) of XetaWave, explains: “You have to build them in house.” After 30 years of designing and build- ing radios, he explains that quality is essential when selling products for mission-critical applications: “RF devices have a large amount of compo- nents packed into a small space.
etaWave is a manufacturer of high performance, reliable industrial wireless data radios.
XetaWave radios are assembled and subjected to some intense testing pro- cedures. When selecting SMT equip-
ment, XetaWave needed machines to be robust and scalable while also
fast and easy to get new products up and running on the line,” offers Linn.
Scalability & Flexibility Another factor that played a
role in XetaWave choosing the SX 1
was established to give best-in-class results by choosing the Horizon 8 screen printer from DEK (
www.dek.com). All of the stencils used at XetaWave are manufactured with a nano-slick coating on the underside which prevents paste sticking to the bottom of the stencil. The result is a high-quality print process. With best-in-class printing and parts placement equipment, the new SMT line provides a tremendous amount of production flexibility. “Not only does our best-in-class SMT line help us deliver quality and build to order,” says Linn, “it’s a great sell- ing point for our customers. Many of them are really excited about the fact that we do our own manufacturing and its one of the key areas we show them when they come to visit.” “There are two benefits to hav-
ing a world class manufacturing facility in house,” says Selma Salihagic, XetaWave’s Director of Manufacturing. “One is being able to
Ian Linn, SMT Manager at XetaWave with one of the company’s prized SIPLACE assembly machines.
being capable of producing best-in- class quality. “Any delta in price between equipment sets soon gets eaten up by lack of throughput, poor- er yield and higher attrition when you select a low-cost alternative,” notes Ian Linn, SMT Manager at XetaWave. “What we need as an RF device manufacturer is the ability to
“What we need as an RF device manufacturer is the ability to handle leading-edge, very small components that get designed into our product.”
Misplace one of those components and you have a problem.” That meant that outsourcing was not an option. Manufacturing at XetaWave
starts with surface-mount-technology (SMT) assembly. The SMT line con- sists of a best-in-class production line using two SX 1 placement machines from SIPLACE (
www.siplace.com) equipped with the SIPLACE Speed - Star CP20 head and the flexible SIPLACE MultiStar CPP head. After printing, placement, and reflow,
handle leading-edge, very small com- ponents that get designed into our product,” said Linn. A typical XetaWave radio will have compo- nents from 0201 to 256 pin BGAs, as well as a shield to 30 x 40mm in size. “What we like most about SIPLACE is the ability to control everything in the placement process. Feeders are easy to load and they can be pro- grammed to run at different acceler- ations for problematic parts. The NPI tools and user interface make it
systems was the scalability of the platform. XetaWave’s SMT line is now configured to run at the capaci- ty needed at present, but the capaci- ty can easily be scaled to double the output of the SMT line by adding a gantry to each of the SIPLACE machines. In doing so, the rest of the line will remain the same, with no need to reposition the oven or printer or other parts of the production line. The feeder space on 2 SIPLACE SX machines allows XetaWave to estab- lish one side of the production line with a fixed setup of common parts used in most XetaWave products. The other side of the line contains setups “split” onto two sides of the table, allowing fast and easy changeover from one product to the next. This production-line setup allows the company to achieve a build-to-order operation that is a key part of its custom RF solution busi- ness model. Along with the firm’s high-qual-
ity parts placement capabilities, Linn ensured that the print process
The flexible SIPLACE MultiStar CPP head provides precision control of component placement.
build a high quality product and the other is being able to build to order.” According to Salihagic: “XetaWave benefits from its manufacturing capability with a very fast turn-
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