We all talk about the Industrial Revolution. The world has gone through a number of “Industrial Revolutions” since the creation of steam power in England. In fact, we talk about three such revolutions since that first one. In the early 2010s, the German Government proposed a fourth industrial revolution they called INDUSTRU 4.0. Today we also call it “The Smart Factory”! But, to date, there hasn’t been too much reported progress in this program. The one notable exception is in the United States—in fact in New Hampshire—for printed circuit fabrication.Get more news about Quick Turn Pcb Assembly,you can vist our website!
In 2015, a U.S. automotive and aircraft equipment/warnings OEM, Whelen Engineering, of Connecticut, created the first new printed circuit fabrication facility in the world! And it was everything the Germans had proposed as a “Smart Factory”. In many ways, it was more than Industry 4.0, as it was totally automated, with no production workers, and it was GREEN—it recycled all its water and chemicals.
Whelen had always been noted as an OEM that believed in vertical integration, as they produced all their components in-house except for the bare PCBs, which they bought from China. Their owner decided to look into the economics of building their printed circuits themselves. Fortunately, he hired one of the industries leading futuristS, Alex Stepinski, formerly of Sanmina. Alex was one of those experienced printed circuit engineers that keeps up on technology, and convinced Whelen management that he needed to visit and learn from the best around the world. The resulting printed circuit facility turned out to be the world’s most advanced.
Plating made up the core of the manufacturing process. As you can see from Figure 1, the automation centers around metalization, imaging, plating, etching and solder mask. With 4 different final finishes as alternatives. The central plating concept was panel plating with a horizontal-pulse plater with the capability to produce multilayer inner-layers in the same line.
From Station-1, after drilling, it is only 108 minutes to Station-38, after SM and the final finish and then to final fabrication and test.Whelen’s manufacturing campus was in New Hampshire. But N.H. didn’t want to provide a permit for a typical PCB fabricator. Whelen rose to the challenge by proposing a facility that would NOT emit any liquid wastes and only sold scrap suitable for the county landfill. Since this was to be a totally new greenfield site, equipment and processes were selected that could be recycled and regenerated. Figure 2 shows a number of the new machines.
To ensure maximum flexibility for expansion, prototypes and developing high-density processes, Alex created a system where the economic order quantity was one panel. Then prototypes and volume production could be easily mixed. Aiding this was the fact that no human would ever touch a panel, therefore many processes could be simplified with the results being sometimes 50% fewer process steps and nearly perfect yields.
The results below speak for themselves. The eSmart Factory is here and ready to be implemented around the world as labor costs and environmental concerns are no longer a hinderance!
