-
- News
- Books
Featured Books
- smt007 Magazine
Latest Issues
Current IssueBox Build
One trend is to add box build and final assembly to your product offering. In this issue, we explore the opportunities and risks of adding system assembly to your service portfolio.
IPC APEX EXPO 2024 Pre-show
This month’s issue devotes its pages to a comprehensive preview of the IPC APEX EXPO 2024 event. Whether your role is technical or business, if you're new-to-the-industry or seasoned veteran, you'll find value throughout this program.
Boost Your Sales
Every part of your business can be evaluated as a process, including your sales funnel. Optimizing your selling process requires a coordinated effort between marketing and sales. In this issue, industry experts in marketing and sales offer their best advice on how to boost your sales efforts.
- Articles
- Columns
Search Console
- Links
- Events
||| MENU - smt007 Magazine
A Look at an Engineering-focused EMS Provider
December 31, 1969 |Estimated reading time: 2 minutes
SMT Magazine spoke with Sean O'Neil and Scott Penin of Design Solutions, Inc. (Santa Barbara, Calif.), to learn about how the company assembles products based on an engineering and new product introduction (NPI) mindset. DSI provides communication between design and fabrication aspects of the industry, with two-thirds of the staff in engineering and one-third in manufacturing. Customers are pushing for tighter tolerances and greater accuracy in dispensing equipment, O'Neil says, and they see reliability as a given.
DSI operates seven U.S. locations, one German-based office, and one Romanian office. The company recently acquired Paradigm Manufacturing Partners, a move that O'Neil referred to as a way for DSI to control the quality of PCB assembly (PCBA) fabrication during the design and engineering process.
SMT: What type of assembly does DSI perform? O'Neil: The manufacturing done at DSI is "proofing." Generally, a couple thousand boards are assembled as a means of verifying and perhaps restructuring design, spacing, layout, etc. Then we can present a well-planned, functional design to the customer without any concerns about manufacturability.
SMT: Do you use tin/lead, lead-free, or both solders? O'Neil: We manufacture with both lead-free and tin/lead solders. About 30% of our product is for military end-users, and about 70% is consumer. Lead-free is certainly interesting to our customers, but many are still able to produce products with tin/lead solder
SMT: When do you use dispense equipment in the assembly process? O'Neil: DSI does surface mount assembly (SMA), so we dispense solder paste. We don't have customers looking for the advanced packaging assembly processes, such as encapsulant and underfill, so we don't use dispense equipment in that area.
SMT: How do you decide when to buy new dispensing equipment? O'Neil: Capital equipment investments like that are almost entirely customer-driven. A customer may present a design that requires new dispensing equipment, or they might ask for a specific system. Reliability is expected of any dispense equipment that we purchase. The customer is often looking to increase accuracy to fit designs with tighter tolerances. Penin: Equipment must fit a given application to merit the capital investment. Dispensed consumables, such as solder pastes, are stored in a two-bin system and reordered bi-weekly, depending on usage.
SMT: What do you require from your dispensing equipment, and the materials you use? O'Neil: We maintain several long-term customers with repeat annual contracts. So, for our facilities, consistency is key. In the NPI and contract manufacturing (CM) industry ¿ whether a contract is fulfilled in a Romanian, German, or U.S. location ¿ the "proof" boards should have the same parameters and be manufactured in the same way. Penin: Our applications are often military, which requires unique system configurations. New systems must provide adequate return-on-investment (ROI) metrics. I look for ease of programming and consistent, measured, output as key elements in dispense equipment.