MUNICH -- Attendance at Productronica picked up in the middle of the week, and the equipment advances for board fabrication on display started to gain some traction.

As typically happens at the biennial Munich trade show, the industry's largest outside of Asia, attendance grew on Days 2 and 3 of the four-day event. The fabrication portion of Productronica is truly representative of the European (and Western, really) PCB market. There were fewer suppliers than in previous years, and much of the hall was filled by other companies, including about 15 EMS suppliers.

That said, most major materials vendors were here, but equipment, the story was different. Hitachi, which was recently sold, was not. Neither was ESI, the laser drill maker.

Imaging equipment was very common, from vendors such as Orbotech, Walter Lemmen, Schmoll, KLG and others.

Schmid had several new machines, including a vertical transport D/E/S line, and a digital exposer aimed at more cost-conscious fabricators. The Direct Digital Imager uses diodes that are bunched together and focused in a polygon scanner (right) instead of a UV laser. It's not as fast but highly reliable and low maintenance. Schmid offers both a manual version and the DDI DT, which has a dual table for higher throughput.

Also at Schmid, among its four laser drill platforms, was the PicoDrill and the PicoFlex. The latter is multifunctional -- for cutting, profiling and drilling -- although it's not as fast as the former. The PicoFlex was rolled out in 2012 and was being shown for the first time at Productronica.

Rainbow Technology displayed its Panda coater, which heretofore had been much discussed but not seen.

Polar Instruments showed the Atlas Si SET2DIL, its second-generation insertion loss tester. It also had the latest version of its SpeedStack layer stackup design tool, which now handles rigid-flex and automatically documents press cycles for sequential lamination.

Dynachem had its SmartLam 5000 dry film laminator, one of which has been sold to Neuschafer Electronik. It also had the CVA 7125 HP6, a new automatic vacuum lamination line.

As mentioned earlier, perhaps the most impressive display was that of Beta Layout, which has partnered with Schmoll to offer a machine for embedding RFID tags. The process involves a robotic placer that picks the tags from a reel and places them into cavities routed or milled in a standard panel up to 18 x 24". An epoxy dispenser then fills the cavity, followed by a 4-minute UV cure. The parts are sized at 3.6 x 1.2 x 0.55mm and the keep-out zone is 10 x 2.3mm, Tony Shoot of Beta Layout said. The chips, from Murata, can be pre-programmed, and come with 512Mb of memory and operate in the 860-960MHz range. The display drew consistent traffic, making it the standout in what was otherwise a somewhat tepid event for board fabrication.

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