Issue link: https://iconnect007.uberflip.com/i/1518339
62 SMT007 MAGAZINE I APRIL 2024 Rittman offered to bring demo equipment and let the ADCO Circuits team play w ith it , as well as someone to help ADCO install, use, and understand the equip- ment. " Th r o u g h Ji m , w e w e r e o f f e r e d t o t e s t drive a system," Barrett says. "ey would deliver it and train us on its use. We figured a demo machine would help us try out the process and determine whether there was a benefit. To our surprise, the demo unit turned out to be a brand-new machine. ey believed that once we learned about the machine and its benefits, we wouldn't send it back. And we didn't." ADCO placed the machine on one of its lines, and aer set up and initial operator training, they were running every board through it. "At first, we thought that because it makes a good go/no-go process control—so that no miss- ing solder paste gets through—we believed we were done," Barrett says. "Luckily, the machine demo also included process and pro- cess control training. Koh Young worked with us to better understand the capabilities of the machine in the process, not just as a go/no-go test. We looked at the equipment a little dif- ferently aer that, and somewhat redeveloped our printing process." Once that happened and they got past that initial stage, Barrett concludes, "It was a ques- tion of 'How did we run so long without it?'" Adding Value with Optics Damman says this was just one part of a tran- sition to more optics, inspection, and mea- surement. "We started with the SPI, then AOI (automatic optical inspection), and now lever- aging that to do the through-hole AOI, so it has expanded capabilities and created efficien- cies," he says. "All these new optics have helped us immensely, not only the SPI systems, but also X-ray reel counting and a new optical sys- tem at incoming inspec- tion to read the labels. Anything we can do to i m p r o v e t h e p r o c e s s will help." Fo r e x a m p l e , w i t h Koh Young 's through- hole inspection system, "if we can make the pro- cess more automated and scientific, rather than relying on the human eye, it makes for a better system all around," Damman says. Adding Value With Data What Barrett and his team noticed initially was the sense of security the inspection equip- ment gave them when running boards day-to- day. "We knew nothing was getting past that didn't have the paste position or volume we specified," he says. ADCO started to think more about what inspection could do on the front end of man- ufacturing before they even built the board; in other words, this included the design phase. "It really allowed us to understand better how the printer worked, how the stencils worked in correlation with that, and then, with an engineering review up front, it allowed us an opportunity to understand our objectives, the certain parts we needed, the requirements of the board and the components on the board," Barrett says. "Maybe you need a certain amount of paste in one area and a little less in a differ- ent area." Now that they're getting measurements, they have the critical data they need, even on hidden joints like BGA or GFNs. "It's not just knowing whether paste is there, but how much is there, what kind, and what it's doing for us," he says. Data That Drives Process Improvement Inspection outcomes could be as straight- forward as go/no-go, but that really doesn't Kevin Barrett Marc Damman