Issue link: https://iconnect007.uberflip.com/i/582861
26 The PCB Magazine • October 2015 an amazing resource to have, because they can come and test a design and within hours have some prototypes. Stepinski: Before they would take days to get prototypes, and now we can do multiple itera- tions in the same time it took to get one proto- type done. Matties: That's a huge advantage. Stepinski: It's a huge advantage for debugging when they're doing a box build. Matties: So you've done it—you did the planning, the execution, and it's running. What would you have done differently? Stepinski: What would I have done different? Because of the time constraints for the design phase of the project, I did a lot of concurrent engineering. I did the high-level design in a very short time, and then the details were worked out over the course of time. As the equipment was being built I'd be in regular conversations with suppliers going through a lot of details, and if I had a little bit more time to have done that all up front instead of doing it concurrently, I prob - ably would have reduced the cost by another 10%. I probably would have been able to reduce the capital cost by 10%, and probably the oper- ating cost by the same amount if I'd had a little more time. But that's the nature of schedules. We can't all have infinite time to do things. Matties: But the next time you do this, I'm sure your knowledge and attention will be in high de- mand. Because a lot of people will look at this and just be blown away by what you have achieved. I've been in this industry for almost 30 years and I've talked with people about doing this, but I don't ever recall seeing anyone do it to this extent. Stepinski: We needed to do something different in this industry. Nobody's built low-tech boards in mass production in the U.S. this century, profitably. Matties: You're profitable, you're healthy, it looks like you have a few bugs you're working Matties: With regard to inspection, I think you only have one AOI in your system. Stepinski: Yes, we use a Camtek AOI to qualify individual part numbers. Once we qualify a part number, we say it's good to run in production and then we continue to do spot inspections as new parts come into the system. So we're actually sam- pling our production on a regular basis to know if there are any potential problems, but we do not do 100% inspection. We only sample based on our product technology and based on the robust- ness of the process, that's all that we need to do. Matties: What sort of fails do you have or what are your yields? Stepinski: We continue to learn some of the de- sign rules for our products. How we apply tool- ing to the products, with certain features doing things a little bit differently, seems to be the root cause of 99% of what we have for issues now. We mitigate that by running a test lap first when we get new tooling and learning from it. That's not a long-term solution. That's only for the next couple of months until we feel our de- sign rules are robust, based on feedback from that process. Once we get 10 or 20 part numbers that are clean in a row, off we go. Matties: I would think that for your circuit de- sign and new product development team this is WHELEN ENGINEERING REDUCES CyCLE TIME By BUILDING A NEW AUTOMATED PCB FACTORy FeATure camtek aoi machine.