Issue link: https://iconnect007.uberflip.com/i/1466505
66 SMT007 MAGAZINE I MAY 2022 Moreau: KIC has always had monitoring sys- tems. It's been our bread-and-butter core tech- nology for the past 40 years. is past year we added wave process inspection (WPI) as our latest state-of-the-art next generation system. We're not only monitoring the preheat of the wave or the temperature, but we're monitor- ing aspects of the wave. We have profile data throughout the entire process: through the wave, and peak temperatures on the wave, as well as the preheat during production. We also have an industry first: measuring the dwell time in the wave soldering process for every production board. at's the big addition to our technology this past year; it fills the suite of what we have, what we call the thermal process component of inspection, where you have your SPI monitor- ing what's happening on the paste print. You have AOI post placement and AOI at the end of the line, but there's always that missing seg- ment from reflow and wave. at's only been handled by the occasional pass-through pro- file, and with the KIC RPI system, we fill that final void in the whole process of inspecting as you go down the line. Shaughnessy: at's really interesting. It must be something to have to write the soware that can do this. Moreau: Yes. From the beginning of KIC, we have had analytics and AI based on sensor technology. ere are other systems available that do some type of monitoring, but we've had embedded systems, which are sensors embedded into the ovens, accurately track- ing the product, knowing the speed it's going through and the temperatures along the board path. Because of that, for 40 years of having that amount of experience and data, and being out in the field with our customers, we've been able to develop very accurate algorithms and modeling. Our soware is very powerful and able to accurately tell the temperature profile of every single production. Shaughnessy: If it gets sent overseas to some huge volume shop, you can automatically sense what kind of oven it is and figure out what's going on? Moreau: Right. Because we have this unique metric that we use in our soware called pro- cess window index (PWI), it gives the indi- cation of that temperature profile: how well it fits in the process. So, if you are a company with just the development products here in the United States, building up the processes to hand off to either Eastern Europe, Mexico, or over to Asia, the technology transfer for the reflow process becomes very simple because regardless of what oven the other manufac- turer has, if you integrate that KIC system in there, now you're comparing apples to apples and can easily transfer that technology and that process over. Shaughnessy: ey have access to the data when they need it, and in a format that they prefer. Miles Moreau