Issue link: https://iconnect007.uberflip.com/i/582861
24 The PCB Magazine • October 2015 Matties: Alex, what's your background? How did you get to be so qualified to do this? Stepinski: I've worked for quite a few differ- ent board shops. I've worked in many different positions in those board shops, from working waste treatment, working in the lab where I started, to running engineering for companies, from being the general manager of a company to working in quality, running manufacturing, doing purchasing, etc. By working in many dif- ferent shops and in many different functions, I was able to compound all the experience to somehow be qualified, I guess. Matties: How many years have you been in the industry? Stepinski: It will be 18 years this year. Matties: What other issues should fabricators take into account? Stepinski: I would think the green side of things must be taken into account. A lot of people miss how cost-effectively they can improve their lot in life from an environmental health and safety perspective. Our capital cost was less than what an average facility pays for a conventional waste treatment system that has significant waste wa- ter discharge and air toxics. I think that's some- thing that a lot of people can look at and im- prove. If they looked at how we did it over here, with a lot of point source solutions with recy- cling the etch and recovering all the copper, not having any waste is significant. I think we really put a stake in the ground here that the industry needs to look at, in terms of how to be totally clean, keep operating costs far below a standard factory for wastewater treatment and environmental control in gener- al, and spend less money on it, just by looking at how waste integrates with the process. When you engineer a process, look at the waste. That's my message. I don't think anybody really does it very much. Matties: Talk about your process. I notice that you're using the DIS pinless lamination system. How's that working out? Stepinski: We've only used it a few times because we're focusing on ramping up the double-sided before we move to multilayer, but initially all the results passed. Eliminating pins in our sys- tem and using vision-based alignment for every- thing is a key point of the factory. Every stage in this factory is vision-aligned, whether it is layup, drill, rout, score, imaging with inkjets, legend, or soldermask—everything is vision aligned. Where the image can be scaled, we scale it some- times to meet the final print. We may add some for manufacturing tolerances, but everything, if it's not scaled, is still rotated and shifted, zero- corrected to the optimal alignment to the image that it needs to align to, preceding. Boards in transit. DiS pinless lamination system. WHELEN ENGINEERING REDUCES CyCLE TIME By BUILDING A NEW AUTOMATED PCB FACTORy FeATure