Issue link: https://iconnect007.uberflip.com/i/634491
60 SMT Magazine • February 2016 by Patty Goldman i-coNNEcT007 This is Part 2 of an interview I conducted at SMTAI with the founder of The Jefferson Proj- ect and the forthcoming Jefferson Institute of Technology, Tom Borkes. In Part 1, which ran in the January 2016 issue of SMT Magazine, Tom provided his well-researched plan to intro- duce students to tech manufacturing through a four-year, hands-on, real-world college learning experience that brings tech manufacturing to them. We also discussed the paper he present- ed at SMTAI, which focused on the concept of building meta-process control into an assembly operation's infrastructure. In Part 2, taken from the original interview, Tom expands on the example set forth in his SMTAI paper, and describes another important tool in reducing labor cost through the reduc- tion of labor content: designing for automa- tion. Goldman: You spoke about meta-process con- trol as a tool to help reduce the labor associated with dealing with assembly yield loss. Please tell me about the other subject the paper addresses— design for automation. Borkes: A good example is the one we intro- duced in the paper. We looked at a product for opportunities to reduce labor cost by reducing labor content through automation. From a de- sign point of view, components that require hand soldering, relatively speaking, are usually labor intensive. The components chosen in this case were standard right-angle pins (Figure 1). In this application, they are usually found in groups of five per board and are soldered to small daughter circuit cards. The pins permit the small PCBs to be plugged-in to a mother- board, vertically, to save board real estate. The bare small circuit boards are fabricated in 200- up panels (i.e., using 1000 pins per panel. Nor- mally what you do is singulate the panel and take five standard right-angle pins, put them in the board, and hand solder them. An assembly constraint is that when you're done the five pins must parallel to each other. We created a new pin. This pin was designed for total automation so you can print paste over the through-holes on the board, insert this pin, The Jefferson ProJecT, Part 2: Featu re Automation as a counterweight to Low Labor-rate Assembly