To increase its production capacity Innovative Circuits has ordered a new alkaline etching line with tin stripper as well as a resist-stripper machine from the equipment manufacturer SCHMID.

With the acquisition of the new production equipment the American bare-board PCB supplier is strengthening its technological advance and secures a long-term planning security.

Both systems will be manufactured in SCHMID’s optimized InfinityLine design, which is the combination and innovative optimization of previous SCHMID CombiLine and PremiumLine. The InfinityLine adopts for instance the small passage slots from CombiLine or the spray manifold connection from PremiumLine and combined the advantages of both modular systems.

The SCHMID alkaline etching line permits a much higher accuracy over the etched surface and therefore an optimized geometry of the etching foot. The Fineline spray system and the intermittent etching with single nozzle control enable an etching process with qualities that were considered hard to achieve until recently.

“The new SCHMID equipment enables uniform etching pattern and line/space structures in circuit boards with an etching factor capability superior to previous offerings. We now are able to reliably achieve our target of producing line/space parameters with ½ oz copper thickness of sub 3-mil lines and spaces”, says Dale Lovell, Chief Engineer at Innovative Circuits.

Moreover, the alkaline InfinityLine etching module considerably reduces the scrap rate and the amount of reworking in the etching technology sector. Depending on the production lot, the system automatically adjusts the parameters required for processing and closely maintains the correct chemical parameters. Product-specific recipes can be stored and hence set-up times reduced.

“We have made technological improvements with regard to chemical carryover, filtration and dosing accuracy. The machine availability has been further increased and the very compact and user-friendly design makes our equipments easily accessible for maintenance,” says Fred Johnson, Director Sales North America, Business Unit Electronics at SCHMID. Above all, the reproducibility of the etching which results from the recipes stored in the system gives Innovative Circuits a distinctive competitive advantage.

Innovative Circuits

Innovative Circuits, based out of metro Atlanta, is a fabricator of high reliability printed circuit boards. Since 1998 Innovative has supported defense, aerospace and commercial applications with solutions that meet the most demanding challenges. Innovative Circuits is ITAR registered and ISO 9001:2015 certified for fabrication of complex rigid, Teflon®, Flex, and Rigid-flex circuitry. For additional information please visit www.innovative-circuits.com

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