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90 SMT Magazine • November 2015 Portability of Production between PCb Assembly Lines In the context of PCB assembly operations, by portability, we mean the ability to easily move the assembly of a specific PCB design from one assembly line to another or from one facto- ry to another, or rapid switching on a specific as- sembly line between the production of different products. The business drivers behind this are: • Reduction in working capital resulting from lean production techniques that call for small lots of PCB assemblies to be produced according to downstream inventory demand signals. • Supply-chain discontinuities making it impossible to continue production of a certain product, requiring fast switching to production of another product. • Supply-chain flexibility for the product- owner to switch rapidly from one manufactur- ing service provider to another. • Maintaining high asset utilization of the assembly lines themselves. Typically, the ma- chinery that comprises the assembly line ties up the majority of the fixed-asset capital of the manufacturer so, just as airlines need to keep their planes in the air to earn money, the as- sembly manufacturers need to maximize the time when the assembly lines are assembly products. Assuming that component supply and ma- chine availability are not limiting factors, the most important capability for addressing the above-mentioned business drivers is fast ma- chine programming with all the data neces- sary to begin production of a new product. The primary burden here is the generation and management of the machine-level component libraries that determine how the different ma- chines (placement, inspection, text) will treat each component on the PCB. STreAmLINING PCb ASSembLy AND TeST NPI WITH SHAreD ComPoNeNT LIbrArIeS arTIcLe Figure 9: Shared library content, classifications, and rules enable portable DFA analysis.