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14 The PCB Magazine • October 2015 Enter Alex Stepinski, a long-time PCB industry veteran hired by Whelen to design and oversee the building of the first captive PCB manufac- turing facility in North America in years. Alex has been in the industry for many years, working at iconic factories like TTM and San- mina. When Whelen contacted him to lead the effort, he was excited, and rightfully so. Imag- ine being given a $12M budget with an emp- ty 45,000 square-foot blank canvas to design a PCB line of your choosing, from the ground up. Whelen didn't micromanage or overburden Alex with requirements either—they gave him complete freedom to design the factory as he saw fit as long as there was a reasonable ROI and the line could handle their typical work of sin- gle- and double-sided boards, with a few multi- layers mixed in. The company manages about 2,500 different part numbers in their product lineup. These were their basic requirements, and what they got in return was so much more. When it's all said and done, Whelen will have the world's first fully automated in-line, lights out, zero-liquid discharge, 100% digi- tal PCB factory. Alex saw this as a great op- portunity to not just build a PCB manufactur- ing process, but a completely automated PCB manufacturing process. The interesting thing to note is that Alex chose the automation route primarily because it of- fered him the quickest ROI over every other option available. It's an extremely impressive setup, and unlike any other PCB fab facility you've likely ever seen. The whole line is rect- angular, with a control tower-type building in the middle, allowing you to follow a board through the entire cycle. It's a conveyor belt process where you load a drilled board on one end and about 4.5 hours later a complet- ed PCB emerges at the other. Forget having to send boards across the ocean; Whelen reduced their cycle times from days to hours. Whelen designers can have their test and prototype boards in hand by the end of the day. At first glance, what is most noticeably lacking is man- power. The open-space layout makes it easy to look down the length of the line and see two operators where you would normally expect 8–10 people in a typical board shop. To cut down cycle time, the new facility features a substantial amount of innovation— much of which is new and unproven and comes with considerable risk. Alex did not take the safe approach when doing this; he wanted to not only automate, but also reduce the overall cycle time by bringing in new technology like Mutracx's Lunaris primary imaging equipment, an impressive piece of technology that prints the primary image on the board in about two minutes—prior to plating. The machine plays a key role in the process, printing around 50 double-sided panels an hour, as well as having a built-in AOI. From there, the board goes into an automat- ed plating line provided by Integrated Process Systems (IPS), who not only built the plating line, but were selected by Alex to be the primary equipment partner, supplying over a third of all of the equipment installed there. The factory FeATure WHELEN ENGINEERING REDUCES CyCLE TIME By BUILDING A NEW AUTOMATED PCB FACTORy aerial view of one automated process.