-
- 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
Selective Soldering: The Solution for Geospace Technologies
February 27, 2013 |Estimated reading time: 7 minutes
Bryan Steffen, SMT manager and process engineer at Geospace Technology in Houston, Texas, had a challenge on his hands. Demand for his company's existing products was increasing exponentially, and new products were also being introduced. He needed to increase productivity to meet those increasing demands, but without sacrificing quality, extending delivery times, or increasing the cost. In addition, he had to increase capacity within the same 6,000 square feet of manufacturing space, as expansion wasn’t possible. He needed to produce more while maintaining profitability.
Geospace Technologies has developed innovative products for seismic data acquisition as a part of the oil and gas industry's global search for more energy reserves since 1980. Selective soldering of specific connections or sites is part of the manufacturing and assembly process for the electronic PCB circuit assemblies that are used.
“Prior to my joining the company, all of our PCB assemblies were built on the outside by contract manufacturers,” Steffen recalls. “Most of the PTH parts were hand-soldered due to the tight component spacing typical of our assemblies. This also meant the product could not be wave soldered.” Hand soldering is time-consuming and expensive due to labor costs and quality and repeatability vary greatly due to the human skill factor involved. There had to be a better way, he reasoned, if his company was going to have any chance of meeting production goals while maintaining a healthy profit margin.
While previously employed as a process engineer at another company where he implemented selective soldering, Steffen had become acquainted with ACE Production Technology Selective Soldering systems. With the help of ACE’s engineering resources, and the assistance of CEO Alan Cable and Process Development Engineer Greg Goodell, he successfully applied selective soldering to his company’s application. When he joined Geospace, he immediately moved to purchase two KISS selective soldering machines; the first was installed in March 2011. He then added a second machine in May 2011, and recently installed three more, for a total of five systems now in operation in one facility. As these machines were put online, Steffen performed careful cost and logistics studies and analyses to determine how well they were affecting his productivity now that he had brought PCB assembly in-house.
As productivity demands increased, Steffen saw that he was going to need to add even more capacity and, in search of the best "bang for the buck," he and his staff performed evaluations multiple selective soldering systems.
“Up to the point where we purchased our third ACE selective soldering machine, we were running more than 90,000 boards a month just on the two machines we already had in two shifts. With our current forecast ramping up, new products about to hit the marketplace, and demand from existing customers, I could see that we were going to need to be able to build, at least, nearly double what we'd been seeing. We were on our way to exceeding our existing capacity limits.”
In examining competitive selective soldering machines (e.g., quality, capability, and repeatability) throughput was paramount. Steffen conducted careful comparative time studies to see how the different selective soldering machines stacked up against one another. “We looked at big-name brands and compared cost of ownership, initial cost of investing in the products, and operating costs and, in the end, we saw that it was cheaper and more cost-beneficial for us to continue with the ACE equipment.”
Steffen says, “We conducted time studies with two competitive systems against processing time in the KISS-103 manual loading machine. One machine just flat-out failed to come close. The only machine could beat the ACE machine was their $400,000 system, and that was only by seven seconds and considerable process tweaking. But, initially, time studies put the performance of the expensive competitor at literally twice as slow as the $75,000 ACE machine.”
Steffen had the data that he needed. "We just bought a second Universal SMT production line, three more ACE selective soldering machines, and hired the additional folks needed to run them. At the end of the day, five ACE selective soldering machines have not only allowed us to get product from the stockroom through the process and into our end users hands weeks faster, but have also succeeded in keeping the costs down. The quality has been nothing short of excellent and the repeatability has been unchanged.”
The KISS-103's are batch machines, Steffen clarifies, larger processing area systems that will solder a manually-loaded 18" x 24" board entirely without intervention. One of the five machines is a KISS-104, the completely automated "in-line" version of the KISS-103, also capable of handling boards up to 18" x 24". It has a SMEMA pass through conveyor that features automatic conveyor width adjustment and a "crowder" to facilitate positive location of the board. The five machines all operate at the same time, but not inline. “We run all of our different PCBs through the selective soldering machines to attach LEDs, connectors, through-hole ICs, and other devices as required,” Steffen says. “We have two operators for five machines. All machines operate simultaneously, and each one has a different dedicated task, although each one could actually run the same product and thus we would end up getting five times the throughput of the same product if we wanted to.” He adds, “The beauty of having this many ACE machines is that we now have the flexibility to run every product we produce on any one of our machines at any given time.”
He continued, "In the quest for speed, however, 'stamp soldering' isn’t an option, because in an ever-changing environment where customers want smaller and cheaper, most of our products violate IPC spacing recommendations, thus we can't stamp solder. We have through-hole components that need to be selectively soldered that are 0.1 mm away from SMT parts.” The KISS-103s, soldering both lead-free and tin/lead (hi-rel) applications using separate solder pots, are simply performing programmed soldering routines using a single nozzle and single solder pot per machine. A key advantage is the machine's ability to get into extremely tight spaces and achieve excellent solder connections for through-hole components without pulling off adjacent SMT components.
The machines have no special "bells" or "whistles" Steffen has modified the process so that he can keep the solder pot hotter and closer to the board--a preheater is not required. At one point, the efficiency of the process was such that, when he sent their time studies back to ACE for evaluation, company engineers responded that Steffen was running product faster than was recommended.
“Our ROI was about three and a half to four months on the initial start-up costs nearly two years ago to bring one Universal Instruments SMT production line online, including the first two ACE selective soldering machines and all other peripherals,” Steffen says. "This was, in part, because each one of the selective soldering machines actually takes the place of eight skilled hand solderers.” His company was running extremely high volume, and Steffen conducted more time studies based on "average" speed hand soldering technicians; this was determined by finding the middle ground between the slowest and fastest technicians, beginning with one PCB, then two PCBs, and then averaging the time across 10 panels or 10 boards. “That's how we came up with our ROI,” he explains. “That's a ridiculously fast ROI, considering that we build more than 120 different products. On one assembly in particular, built outside, our average turnaround time for 12,000 boards was six to eight weeks. We can now do 12,000 boards in 24 hours and have them boxed and ready to ship four days later. Outside manufacturing costs were going up and once we brought the product in-house our costs dropped instantly and dramatically."
Steffen adds that product quality is currently at 98.7% FPY, but, historically speaking, when assembly was being contracted out, the quality was between 85 and 90% FPY.
Geospace is expanding, possibly purchasing an additional building, with Steffen’s operation moving to a completely different area that will add another 2,000 square feet to the dedicated PCB/SMT build area. He notes that currently, with two Universal Instruments SMT production lines and the five KISS 103 machines, his SMT department is producing between 140,000 and 150,000 boards per month in just 6,000 square feet. “We’re compact, but I have an excellent team around me and an extremely robust process in place,” Steffen concludes.Alan Cable is the owner and president of ACE Production Technologies Inc. and has more than 40 years' experience in the electronics manufacturing arena. His expertise is high-speed production manufacturing automation, equipment design, and process engineering. For the past 25 years, Cable has focused specifically on soldering issues relating to component solderability, lead tinning, and selective soldering.