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Robotic setup speeds selective soldering

CIL, the Whitchurch based electronics design and manufacturing company, has maintained its commitment to expansion and improved manufacturing efficiency by installing an Opus 3 selective soldering machine from Tyco.

Standard wave soldering techniques are not suitable for through-hole PCBs that have surface mount components or sensitive items such as batteries on both sides of the board. This means that normally these have to be hand soldered, an extremely expensive and time consuming task. The Opus 3 is a four-axis Cartesian robot designed specifically for selectively soldering through-hole and odd-form components on to the underside of surface mount and mixed technology PCBs without inverting the board.

The use of this machine results in dramatic savings in labour and reduction in lead-times. For example, one product assembled by CIL is fitted with batteries on the underside of the board and to hand solder the 200,000 solder joints demanded by the 20,000 a month production run took four full time operators. Now, with the Opus 3, it takes one person just over five minutes to set up the machine and, while it is running, the same operator performs the next function down the line.

Managing director, John Boston, said: "The use of the Opus 3 greatly reduces the labour content of our manufacturing process and makes us more competitive. It also allows us to reduce manufacturing lead-times to our customers and quality control is improved due to the reduction of human error.

The Opus 3 is able to solder pads down to 0.010 inches and typically performs a solder joint every two seconds. All programs for different PCB types are stored on its PC controller and the OPUS 3 is able to run in a lead free environment.

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