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May 2016 • The PCB Magazine 57 automation is tHe talk of tHe town at CpCa sHow 2016 thing now in the flex processing industry. It's now pretty standard and almost every handler in the industry can do that reasonably well. The problem is that, once you start processing at high throughputs, you're moving the material very quickly and the roll-to-roll handler needs to be able to keep up with that fast movement. When you talk about thinner and thinner ma- terials, which we're processing more frequently now, those thinner materials are more prone to wrinkling and stretching. Many of our customers have run into issues where they can no longer keep the tight toler- ances they need and the accuracies they require as they go to these thinner materials, because the material starts warping. We decided that this was an ideal time to bring to market, together with our partner Northfield Automation, a roll- to-roll handler that addressed the problem. And we believe that the ESI RollMaster is the solu - tion to the problem of processing the thinner and more sensitive flexible circuit materials at high throughput. It has a very responsive "danc- er," which is basically the part of the roll-to-roll handler that responds quickly to motion by the stage inside the laser drilling tool. As the stage moves back and forth, the dancer has to main- tain the tension on the roll-to-roll material. Starkey: Just to be clear, are we talking about machining on a constantly moving web, or in a step-and-repeat mode? Riechel: It's a good clarifying question. The ESI tools have a patented compound beam posi- tioning technology, which continuously moves the stages, the galvanometers and, in our case, also acoustic optic devices on the 5335 and GemStone tools. What happens there is, be- cause you're moving these three beam position- ing technologies at the same time, you have to move the material back and forth continu- ously. It's not just moving in one direction, as you would with most wet process technologies, for instance. You're actually moving back and forth, forward and backward, continuously. The challenge there is that you have accelera- tion and deceleration that is, in some cases, ran- dom and very fast, and the web handler needs to be able to compensate for that continual ac- celeration and deceleration, and do so very re- sponsively. If it does not do it very responsively, the result of that can be wrinkling of the web and other types of stretching issues. The reason being, if the dancer is dragging against the mo- tion of the stage, you are pulling here going one direction and pulling by the dancer in the other direction, it can cause stretching or wrinkling. Starkey: What sort of position or tolerances are you able to achieve? Riechel: The 5335 flex processing product family for ESI maintains processing accuracies of 20 microns. After aligning to all of the align- ment points on the material, we maintain plus- minus 20-micron accuracy across the entire panel processing area, which we do up to 533 x 635 mm. Starkey: Are we talking purely about a drilling operation or are we talking about a part drilling and part profiling operation? Riechel: We have the ability both to drill and do routing or profiling. Typically with roll-to-roll processes, however, you limit your- self to drilling because if you cut out profiles, then where does the cut-out material go? You could get around that by having laminated PET material on the bottom of your flex material. Some customers do that, but more often they will do that sort of routing or profiling opera- Patrick Riechel