Circuits Assembly Online Magazine - News

News

Chief executives from several leading high technology companies called on Congress this week to stay away from policy initiatives that penalize companies from outsourcing labor to foreign nations.

"As the U.S. encounters new global realities policy makers face a choice: we can compete in the international arena or we can retreat," said Craig Barrett, chief executive officer of Intel Corp. "America can only grow jobs and improve its competitiveness by choosing to compete globally, and that will require renewed focus on innovation, education and investment."

In a report issued today, the Computer Systems Policy Project said U.S. companies "must engage in business worldwide to capitalize on opportunities and respond to competitive challenges."

"Countries that resort to protectionism end up hampering innovation and crippling their industries, which leads to lower economic growth and ultimately higher unemployment," said CSPP in its report.

CSPP, whose members include Michael Dell, Carly Fiorina, Sam Palmisano, Joseph Tucci, Ed Zander and Barrett, among others, lobbied Congress for programs that promote technological innovation and improve education and training for American students and workers.

"As a nation we must renew our investment in competitiveness, just as businesses must do," said Fiorina, chairman and CEO of HP. "Today we're calling on our national leaders to partner with the private sector to develop a competitiveness agenda that maintains the processes and discipline that made the U.S. the leading technology exporter it is today."

Barrett said white-collar jobs in the U.S. are no longer a guarantee. "It had been assumed we had a lock on white-collar jobs and high-tech jobs. That is no longer the case."

Noting the disparity in federal subsidies for agriculture, which number the in the tens of billions of dollars, versus those for physical sciences--reportedly just $5 billion--Barrett said, "I can't understand why we continue to pour resources into the industries of the 19th century."

AMTECH Inc. (Branford, CT), a supplier of solder powders, pastes, fluxes and associated products used in electronic assemblies, has introduced NoVOC™, a water-based, no-clean liquid flux for use in wave soldering.

The low solids liquid flux contains no rosins, resins or volatile organic compounds (VOCs). It improves solder joint reliability and reduces the risk of rework since it leaves no insulating residue on test pads or conductive pads. The no-clean formula eliminates the need for wash-up, since any residual flux residues are non-corrosive and halide-free.

The flux features low surface tension, for wetting prior to wave soldering double sided or multi-layer boards. It is ideal for board assemblies containing sensitive sliding switches or conductive carbon pads.

With water as the main ingredient, the flux is inherently more economical to manufacture than rosin-based fluxes. As a non-hazardous material, it easily transported and contains no irritants.

The flux is available in 1, 5 and 55 gallon containers. It can be applied by spraying or dipping and can be diluted when required by using deionized water.

www.solderproducts.com

Shoda Techtron Ltd. (Hamamatsu, Japan), a manufacturer of printed circuit scoring, beveling and shear/beveling systems, announced that it has entered into a sales and service agency agreement with Christopher Group Inc. (Santa Ana, CA) for distribution of their complete product range of products in the North American market.

Shoda has also announced the introduction of the ACS-1500NC III automatic laminate cutting saw, developed for materials to .002 inches in thickness, and the IT-700HA automatic printed circuit board (PCB) thickness measurement system. The system was developed to accurately measure thickness of PCBs for controlled impedance applications.

Shoda has installed over 1,500 systems worldwide, while Christopher provides distribution and engineering support focused on the North American market.

www.stech.co.jp

www.christopherweb.com

Universal Instruments (Binhamton, NY) has trimmed the footprint and increased the maximum board size for its high-speed placement platform. According to the company, the result is more flexibility in a smaller shop-floor space. The new 4797R HSP accepts up to 96 feeders with placement speed maintained at 48,000 cph.

The machine is capable of handling boards up to 610 mm (24 in.) x 460 mm (18 in.) within a footprint machine measuring 3,100 mm (122 in.) x 2,155 mm (84.8 in.). Three-sigma accuracy is 0.08 mm for MELFs and small chips and 0.05 mm for leaded components.

Accepting up to 72 components on standard 8 mm tape feeders, or 96 components with dual-track feeders, the machine has a minimum placement tact time of 0.075 seconds. Feeder axis tact time is 0.09 seconds or 0.08 seconds with the dual-track feeder.

Standard equipment includes 12 five-spindle, advanced direct-drive placement heads and Universal's software for offline programming. Available options include component library data teach, pattern program data teach, barcode validation system (BVS), traceability package, ball grid array (BGA)/ chip scale package (CSP) recognition, and GEM/SECS II.

www.uic.com

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