Issue link: https://iconnect007.uberflip.com/i/1530610
56 PCB007 MAGAZINE I DECEMBER 2024 heads even smaller, faster, and better able to keep up with the demands of PCB fabricators. Regarding your selective compliance assembly robot arm (SCARA) suite of machines, how did those come about? What were you trying to address? Can you give a brief description of the differences between the different SCARA solutions? We spent a long time developing our products for the assembled backplane market, as men- tioned, adding features and customization, but these generalized machines have a lot of over- head, both in cost and setup/runtime. It was time to strip them back to the core to provide a solution for testing PCBs. e SCARA machines are our way of devel- oping lower cost machines that are special- ized for the target market, whilst at the same time retaining what we believe to be some of the unique selling points. ese include carry- ing the TDR measurement unit on the robotic arm/head, enabling it to be as close as possible to the area of the PCB being tested, and mas- sively increasing the measurement resolution, something that is just not possible with a system where the TDR measurement unit is in a fixed location. We also wanted to retain the ability to make multiple connections to the PCB in one insertion, thus reducing test times and therefore facilitating a 100% test of a high-speed PCB. As an equipment manufacturer, what are some of the biggest hurdles you've had to overcome? e cost associated with new product devel- opment continues to be the biggest hurdle for RoBAT. A large portion of our budget is around developing machines from design concepts to reality, to cope not just with current but the PCB technology. As I men- tioned when Pete Starkey visited our facility, we did not initially plan to develop a machine to carry out a fully automatic TDR test of high-speed PCBs. For many years, RoBAT developed machines for test- ing assembled backplanes f r o m s h o r t s / c o n t i n u i t y / AOI, then X-ray, and more recently, TDR. It was the test results from these machines that real ly s ur pr i s ed u s. Whilst our assembly house customers were happy with the faults we were finding that were created in the process of assembling the PCB, the majority of failures the machines found were caused during the manufacturing process of the PCB. It was at this point we started to explore what high-speed TDR test equipment was available for bare PCBs, only to find it was very limited. Bruce, your commitment to automated technology is strong. Can you talk a bit about your use of robotics? Robotics is all about automation. Just look at any normal process that takes a person a long time or requires special attention or training, and program a robot to perform it accurately, quickly, and repeatedly. We live in a world of automation; at RoBAT, we're conscious that whatever new technology we bring to the test industry has to keep up with a fully automated production line. Looking at our own evolution with TDR, over 10 years ago we started with large two- port TDR units in a fixed location within the machine. We then developed a TDR unit that we could just about carry on the machine heads. We were then able to shrink that down to carry 24 port units to better suit our loaded PCB test equipment. Now we're trying to con- dense it even further to make the machine Bruce Nockton