Printed Circuit Design & Fab Online Magazine - Current Issue

Current Issue

MES upgrades capture kanban inventory levels, allowing electronic replenishment pulls.

The visual factory has come a long way since the concept was introduced, moving from production status viewable by walking the factory floor to a comprehensive collection of real-time data viewable from any interconnected computer. That evolution isn't seamless for many electronics manufacturing services (EMS) providers, however. While newer equipment platforms are designed to integrate with manufacturing execution systems (MES) easily, legacy equipment platforms may require specialized programming or other workarounds to achieve desired interoperability. Equipment communication incompatibilities often lead to multiple shop floor control systems being utilized among work areas, which is inherently inefficient.

SigmaTron International's Chihuahua, Mexico, facility recently dealt with these issues when the facility began transitioning to the company's proprietary Tango MES. The company's corporate IT and operations teams have worked together to define enhanced shop floor capabilities in production and are upgrading system capabilities across facilities. The challenge for facilities implementing the latest enhancements is creating efficient equipment interfaces and integrating or replacing legacy processes.

Read more: The Visual Factory and Legacy Equipment and Processes

A DoE reveals the packaging type matters less than the process used.

The need for electrostatic discharge (ESD) protection is drilled into production workers from day one in most electronics manufacturing facilities. Most facilities have multiple layers of protection including floor tiles or conductive coating, smocks, individual grounding devices, ESD mats on workstations, and ionizing blowers throughout the production process. There are also multiple layers of protection from conductive totes to metalized bags for product as it ships out. There is a tendency to believe more protection is always better. Given that the seven wastes include both defects and overprocessing, however, from a Lean manufacturing standpoint there is value in analyzing how much protection is required for shipped products. Considering whether multiple layers of protection create a false sense of security with operators involved in pack/unpack operations also has value.

Read more: ESD Protection and Packaging / Unpackaging

John Sheehan

Needed: Methods to best predict and adjust to demand spikes.

Any supply-chain management executive will likely tell you that 2021 is 2020 on steroids. Reason: While 2020 had supply-chain disruption, the worst part of that disruption was followed by drops in customer demand due to Covid-19-related lockdowns, so the situation never worsened beyond spot shortages or transportation delays. This year, pent-up consumer demand combined with historic low interest rates supporting consumer spending is spiking product demand in multiple industries as consumers make purchases they delayed in 2020. 5G infrastructure is rolling out, demand has increased for electric vehicles, which have substantially more electronic components per car, and Covid-19 continues to drive higher medical equipment production. As a result, demand variations are changing schedules weekly. At the same time, constraints developing in the materials market are driving higher prices and longer lead-times. Transportation and freight resources are stretched, and pricing and lead-times are increasing. Covid-19 continues to cause some level of disruption as hot zones develop around the world. In short, 2021 will be a year where multiple variables are constantly in flux.

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Read more: Materials Environment Drives New Challenges

Hom Ming Chang

A near real-time feedback loop between layout and assembly.

Two core tenets of Lean manufacturing philosophy are eliminating defect opportunities and minimizing process variation. Consequently, most companies embracing Lean principles do some form of design for manufacturability (DfM) analysis to identify manufacturability issues either during design or in the new product introduction phase. In some cases, this is an automated feature of design software. In other cases, this is done manually.

SigmaTron has adopted a hybrid process that uses software automation to speed basic analysis, followed by an engineering review. This E-DFM software tool reduces the time it takes to create a detailed report from several days to a few hours and works with SigmaTron’s existing Valor software platform.

Automating the process improves efficiency, since the engineering team reviews the automatically generated reports and suggests solutions for accuracy instead of individually performing a full analysis themselves. They then can make suggestions to further optimize the recommendations, as needed. The tool has been customized from industry-standard PCBA design rules and SigmaTron’s equipment/process-specific manufacturing guidelines, so it reflects equipment and process constraints.

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Current Issue

The Visual Factory and Legacy Equipment and Processes

ESD Protection and Packaging / Unpackaging

Materials Environment Drives New Challenges

Optimizing Design for Manufacturability Analysis

Subcategories

The Route 63

Abstracts 1

Added Up 2

Best Practices 12

Board Buying 34

Caveat Lector 112

Defect of the Month 27

Designer’s Notebook 115

Final Finishes 1

Flexperts 59

Focus on Business 61

Getting Lean 19

Forefront 21

Global Sourcing 7

Material Gains 62

InFlex 2

Material Matters 23

PCB Guided Insights 11

ROI 137

Signal Integrity Insights 1

The Smart Factory 1

Tech Tips 29

Test and Inspection 13

Seeing is Believing 6

Jernberg PI 8

Smart Engineering 3

What's Old is New 3

Roughly Speaking 7

For Good Measure 1

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