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VOLUME 35 - NUMBER 9 Product Preview:
SMTAI (Virtual)
September, 2020
5G’s Promises for Factory Automation are Worth the Wait
By Michael Skinner, Editor
Viscom showcases latest line- up for AOI, AXI and THT in- spection. Product previews be- gin on…
EM Services Page 64
PHOENIXVILLE, PA — “We’re no longer selling prod- ucts, we’re selling outcomes,” says Sath Rao, head of mar- keting for Hitachi Vantara’s digital manufacturing solu- tions division. “5G is not only connecting the assets with- in the plant, but beyond the four walls of the plant into the supply chain.” By gathering swathes of product data, from materi-
als to packaging, and analyzing them in real time, Rao is confident that 5G networks will enable a new level of
forecasting for manufacturers. This ability to “predict the future” will make some firms exponentially more valu- able, he bets.
Boosting Factory IQ While the global pandemic rages and consumers and
businesses alike are forced to tighten their belts, and slash operating costs, some companies, including Ericsson, re- main undaunted. In March of this year, Ericsson inaugurat- ed its USA 5G Smart Factory in Lewisville, Texas, by pro- ducing its first 5G base station. The company’s mmWave Street
Macro is integral to its portfolio of RF de- vices for North America. All radio access components are housed in a single enclo- sure, which are designed for easy installa- tion in urban centers. The factory in Lewisville runs auto-
BTU Celebrates 70 years of ad- vancing thermal processing technology. EMS section be- gins on…
Page 18 This Month’s Focus:
Assembly and Automation
5G is rolling out in phases, and manufacturers should learn from the B2C segment when upgrading production equipment.
mated warehouses through networked lo- gistics, with a full complement of robotic assembly, packing and product handling systems, as well as autonomous carts. Alongside their robot counterparts are ap- proximately 100 human employees. The 300,000 ft2 (28,000m2) factory is
located near Ericsson’s North American headquarters in Plano. Another significant investment in the North Texas tech scene, the new smart factory came with a price tag of around $100 million.
Continued on page 8
Accu-Assembly Reel Storage Improves Material Flow
SPEA merges smart factory au- tomation with high-volume testing; ECD separates dry storage fact from fiction; Weller discusses drag soldering to touch up high pin count de- vices. Special features begin on…
Page 50
ANDOVER, MA — Accu-Assembly has added a fully automatic, high-ca- pacity, high-throughput SMT compo- nent reel storage system to its portfo- lio of material handling products — the AccuStock. The system is de- signed to maximize storage and min- imize labor in electronics manufac- turing. Founded in 1997, Accu-Assem-
bly provides automation, quality as- surance and material handling solu- tions to SMT manufacturing cus- tomers worldwide. Seeing a need for component feeder verification on SMT placement machines, Accu-Assembly
introduced the BarTector product line in 1998. In addition to developing quality assembly products for pick- and-place systems, Accu-Assembly offers a core competency in software development and interfacing to vari- ous types of databases.
Automatic Reel Storage Used in SMT assembly, Accu-
Assembly’s BarTector, Humi Tel and AccuEye products verify correct part placement, and provide traceability, MSD tracking, and PCB tracking, as well as automatic splice detection. The company’s recently intro-
duced AccuID is an efficient SMT component reel barcode decoding system. The company has also been very involved in the software devel- opment of the VJ Electronix XQuik series of X-ray component reel parts counter systems. There are more than 300 XQuik systems installed worldwide. The new AccuStock reel storage and retrieval system does not use
Continued on page 6
ITHACA, NY — A Cornell Universi- ty-led collaboration has created the first microscopic robots that incorpo- rate semiconductor components, al- lowing them to be controlled — and made to walk — with standard elec- tronic signals. These robots, roughly the size of
paramecium, provide a template for building even more complex versions that utilize silicon-based intelli- gence, could be mass produced and may someday travel through human tissue and blood. The walking robots are the lat-
est iteration, and in many ways an evolution, of Cornell professors Itai Cohen and Paul McEuen’s previous nanoscale creations, from microscop- ic sensors to graphene-based origami machines. The new robots are about five
microns thick, 40 microns wide, and range from 40 to 70 microns in length. Each bot consists of a simple
Continued on page 8
Micro Robots Walk with Laser Pulses
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