October, 2023
www.us-tech.com X-Ray Inspection Grows... Continued from page 64
component, especially when there’s a possi- bility that a malfunctioning end product could have life threatening consequences. Comprehensive inspection ensures that
faulty or counterfeit components won’t endanger outcomes for manufacturers, in effect “de-risking” the procurement process, according to Haber. After a manufacturer’s parts pass inspection, they are stored in the company’s ESD- and climate-controlled warehouse until the customer is ready to take delivery.
Authenticity Assured The process assures manu-
facturers that they are receiving authentic parts while eliminat- ing the need for them to maintain their own logistics and inventory management capabilities, as one satisfied Cofactr customer has stated: “Once a design is shipped to a vendor, it could take two to three days to find and source a single missing component. Across 10 designs, this already adds up to a month of wasted time per year. One of these designs can have 150 pieces. As a startup without a massive logistics department, you either suck all your engineer’s time away man- aging inventory or accept that you will have mistakes. Or you talk to Cofactr,” says James Miller, Head of Avionics at Stoke Space, a Seattle-based rocket launch company. Another Cofactr customer, California-based Domatic, which produces intelligent power sys- tems for energy-efficient and sus- tainable living spaces, had been struggling with lengthy produc- tion delays when chips they had ordered did not work as expected — or didn’t work at all — until they discovered Cofactr’s auto- mated supply chain solution. “Cofactr saves us a full-time
job’s worth of time,” says Gladys Wong, Domatic’s co-founder and COO. “Thanks to them, I didn’t have to hire another person only to monitor inventory and logis- tics. We also eliminated the pro- curement-related bottlenecks we used to have.” While supply chain issues
have eased somewhat in recent months, says Haber, the problem — and the issue of counterfeit components —continues for man- ufacturers of all sizes, and he anticipates that it will take sev- eral years for component suppli- ers to meet the industry’s grow- ing and changing needs. This is nothing new, he
notes; there have been issues for decades, as technology has evolved. “When VCRs came on the market, assemblers needed those chips right away,” he explains, and it took a while for suppliers to catch up. Even with multiple new fabrication foundries in the works, those enterprises can take several
See at productronica, Hall A2 Booth 511
years to build and equip. VCRs may now be history, but sourcing
chips for today’s products still poses similar challenges. “Maybe one in 50 purchases are made on the gray market,” Haber estimates. “If there are 100 different parts on a board, and 20 percent of them are critical chips, one quarter of those, or five, may have to be bought on the gray market.”
Non-Destructive Inspection As a result, “it’s incredibly important for
X-ray image of a counterfeit component (left) and real component (right).
us to do 100 percent nondestructive inspec- tion on parts that do not come from an Continued on next page
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