Circuits Assembly Online Magazine - Features

The Electronic Components, Assemblies and Materials Association (ECA, Arlington, VA) has acquired CARTS, the conference and exposition for passive components.

CARTS USA 2004, the 24th Capacitor and Resistor Technology Symposium, will be held March 29-April 1 in San Antonio, TX. CARTS Europe will be held Oct. 18-21 in Nice, France.

ECA purchased CARTS from the Components Technology Institute (CTI). CTI will continue to manage CARTS during the next two years as ECA takes an increasingly more active role. ECA and CTI will establish a CARTS advisory board that will include officers from both organizations and senior-level executives from electronic component companies.

Leon Hamiter, the show's founder and CTI president, said, "ECA has the membership connections, the conference experience and the reputation within the worldwide resistor and capacitor community to ensure the health and vitality of CARTS into the future."

CARTS will benefit from ECA's extended reach into the electronics industry, according to James Kaplan, chairman of Cornell Dubilier and ECA industry vice president.

CARTS will join an ECA conference line-up that includes the International Relay Conference (IRC), the Electronic Distribution Show (EDS), the Electronic Components and Technology Conference (ECTC) and the International Wire and Cable Symposium (IWCS).

www.ec-central.org

For the second year in a row, GSI Lumonics Inc. (Wilmington, MA) has been recognized by Samsung Electronics as one of its top 20 equipment suppliers. This recognition took the form of an award presented to GSI Lumonics at Samsung's supplier appreciation day last October in Vallejo, CA. Yoonwoo Lee, president and chief executive officer of Samsung Electronics' Device Solution Network, presented the award.

GSI Lumonics supplies Samsung with its M430 WaferRepairT system, used by Samsung to improve yield during the production of dynamic random access memory (DRAM). In addition, Samsung uses other semiconductor and electronics manufacturing equipment from GSI Lumonics, including marking systems and circuit trimming systems.

Nino Federico, vice president and general manager of GSI Lumonics' Systems Group, said, "We are proud to have been honored with this award from Samsung for the second year straight. The award reflects the continuing hard work of our worldwide product and support teams, and again illustrates GSI Lumonics' commitment to advancing technology and solutions in memory repair."

GSI Lumonics supplies precision motion control components, lasers and laser-based advanced manufacturing systems to the global medical, semiconductor, electronics and industrial markets.

www.gsilumonics.com

FocalSpot Inc. (San Diego, CA), a provider of inspection and rework/repair solutions and services, has announced the North American debut of a cost-effective solution for rework applications, Den-on Instruments RD-500SH. Designed for lead-free and standard solder, the system is a vision-based, semi-automated reflow, removal and placement rework station for all printed circuit assemblies, including connectors.

The station combines top and bottom heaters with advanced auto-profiling technology to efficiently heat and reflow rework applications from small PDAs and cell phones, to motherboards and multi-layered avionics back planes. The rework station is ideal for depot repair centers, prototype houses, electronic manufacturers, contract manufacturers and original equipment manufacturers.

The system uses a combination of dark IR and localized hot gas heating technology to deliver temperature and time profiles for even thick boards and high (>40 mm) input/output count area array packages. Rework profiles can easily be established and verified using auto-profiling software. A simple interface enables operators to remove and replace ball grid arrays (BGAs), chip-scale packages (CSP), lang grid arrays (LGAs), quad flat packs (QFPs), plastic leaded chip carriers (PLCCs), connectors and other surface-mount components. The software program and profile information is stored in a Windows XP-configured computer.

The standard station can handle boards up to 400 x 420 mm, but can accommodate larger and smaller boards using optional or custom board holders. Components are quickly aligned and positioned using a digital dual-vision imaging system that views the board and component simultaneously. The system comes with an ultra-quiet vacuum pump capable of running standard air or nitrogen gas.

www.focalspot.com

Valor Computerized Systems (Yavne, Israel), an integrated engineering software solutions provider, has released version 7 of its Trilogy 5000™ solution for printed circuit board (PCB) process preparation and assembly programming operations and its Enterprise 3000™ design for manufacture (DFM) solution for virtual design verification of computer-aided design (CAD) data. The new version is available immediately through Valor sales offices and integration partners worldwide.

The Trilogy software has new enhancements facilitating multi-vendor assembly engineering, substantial additions to DFM verification and extensions to its range of CAD interfaces.

A newly developed Documentation Editor provides functionality enabling fast delivery of customizable set-up instructions right down to the factory floor. The new software offers integrated engineering tools for a streamlined, highly automated CAD-to-machine process flow.

The range of available pick-and-place machine models has been extended in new version to provide new product introduction (NPI) and high-volume manufacturers with a much broader applicative solution. The variety of simulated machine models provide optimized machine programming and increased assembly line efficiency, especially for multi-vendor based assembly line configurations.

To address the growing needs of the PCB design community, Valor's Enterprise platform has been enriched with extensions to CAD interfaces, DFM analysis, BOM & AVL handling and overall performance.

The new version offers a comprehensive set of coherent engineering tools to master design-to-manufacturing obstacles and to deliver a error-free, producible PCB assembly. With over 700 engineering constraint checks performed on the initial PCB design data, the software delivers a validated virtual prototype of the assembled board, verified and optimized for manufacturing, which minimizes the need for multiple prototypes of complex PCBs.

Julian Coates, Valor's executive vice president of corporate marketing and product management said, "We have included over 450 customer specific requests to round out this major version release...We are constantly improving the scope of our NPI solution for the Trilogy 5000 user community, as we understand the urgent needs of our customers to master the ever-increasing complexity of PCB process preparation cycles and PCB designs based on time-to-market pressures and narrowing manufacturing process-constraints."

www.valor.com