Siemens’s Electronics Works Amberg (EWA) manufacturing plant in Amberg, Germany, has a line on which THT components are placed, soldered and inspected full automatically with no manual intervention. The concept demonstrates how established manual processes such as the placement of OSC components or selective wave soldering can be successfully advanced and automated. Siemens’s innovative step consolidates conventional SMT placement and THT technology on a single line and links them automatically. As a result, any further component fastening measures and soldering frames can be dispensed with.
Siemens’s Electronics Works Amberg plant was founded in 1989 and produces SIMATIC programmable logic controllers (PLCs), among other things. The plant churns out one product per second for a total of 17 million last year, and the trend is rising. The World Economic Forum (WEF) named the Siemens plant in Amberg a “digital flagship factory” in 2021.
SIMATIC produces SIMATIC: The versatile SIMATIC controllers also control the machines and automate the production in the EWA. Accordingly, the degree of automation is high. The machines and robots handle more than 75 percent of the value chain with more than 1,000 product variants on their own. “The EWA produces with a quality level of 99.999 percent on the connection level,” says Philipp Fischer, Production Engineer at the EWA. “We benefit from sustainable quality work, comprehensive data integration and high benchmarks in industrial production.”
SMT production has always been characterized by high cost pressures and a wide variety of highly complex production methods with strict quality specifications. Manufacturers are constantly on the lookout for innovative technologies to increase their yield, reduce waste and lower costs – in short, to achieve the maximum return on investment.
“We want to exploit synergies,” says Philipp Fischer. “We currently operate 71 SMT machines from ASMPT in 17 lines along with the complete software architecture. With roughly 350 product changeovers per day, we require not just maximum flexibility but maximal transparency in setup control, material management, and traceability. To meet these needs, we have many complex, event-controlled interfaces between the various systems.
After realigning our production with a consistent focus on technology three years ago, we used the freed-up resources to further increase the plant’s degree of automation. After evaluating several suppliers, we chose ASMPT for the automatic assembly of THT components because we saw clear advantages in terms of technical availability and process robustness. In addition, using ASMPT machines had the benefit that we would easily integrate them into the existing data infrastructure and already had the necessary know-how.”
The actual placement of the components is carried out by a SIPLACE SX system from ASMPT. It operates in single-conveyor mode and is currently equipped with a placement head TWIN VHF. This head places components that are up to 200 by 125 millimeters large and 50 millimeters high with a maximum force of 100 N.
The SIPLACE SX is a standard SMT placement machine that can be flexibly enhanced with additional options to process odd-shaped components (OSCs) and THT components. The options include:
“What I particularly liked about ASMPT’s approach was that we were able to determine the degree of implementation ourselves and make any necessary adjustments during the project’s execution phase. This allowed us to consider many outstanding impulses and ideas which we analyzed and further developed in parallel and were ultimately able to incorporate into the project.”
Many OSCs and especially THT components require special feeder capabilities due to their geometric diversity and packaging types.
ASMPT offers the so-called Feeder Development Kit, which basically allows any supplier to seamlessly integrate his feeding solution into the various SIPLACE placement systems. The Feeder Development Kit provides all the information needed to integrate a feeder solution, ranging from a 3D model of the machine and the installation space to the hardware for controlling the feeder to the complete interface protocol. The degree of the implementation can largely be determined by the user.
For Philipp Fischer, the Feeder Development Kit was exactly what he needed: “Our system administrators have a very large area of responsibility today. This is another reason why we have high demands on the communication between human and machine. It is time-consuming and uneconomical to have to search for the cause of a known problem just because the machine does not output it properly. The Feeder Development Kit enables us – together with the feeder’s manufacturer – to define device-specific error and status messages which are then displayed on the placement machine’s user interface. Such issues related to the communication between machine and feeder are just as important as well-functioning hardware.”
Another innovative feature of the new production line is the fact that it does away with fastening the components on the circuit board prior to the soldering process. Normally, THT components get clinched after they have been inserted into the circuit board. The Amberg plant, however, also installs relays that cannot be clinched because the mechanical stress would damage the components’ legs.
Together with the experts at the SMT Centers of Competence, Siemens’s engineers tested various solution approaches. In a first approach, wet bonding was used. Philipp Fischer explains the procedure: “First attempts to secure the components with glue for the transport turned out well, but we noticed over the course of testing that the transport itself usually does not cause a problem, but the abrupt starts and stops of the circuit boards do. Fortunately, we were able to keep components from tilting or tipping over by adjusting the acceleration and braking movements after the placement process. We discussed this concept with the team from Seho, the maker of our soldering system, to implement a so-called soft-stop option here as well. Today we populate and solder these products fully automatically without any special aids such as gluing or clinching, and without solder frames.”
A brush module for cleaning the underside of the circuit board and a solder joint inspection system have been integrated into the soldering system so that the completed boards can continue to be processed without any additional manual processing steps.
Despite the specialized production process, no expensive special placement machines or robots are needed. The ASMPT concept calls for enhancing standard systems with sensible options or to expand their application spectrum as required. The SIPLACE SX placement machines can be redeployed in the “pure” SMT production environment at any time – an important contribution to investment protection.
Another aspect that is highly important for Philipp Fischer: “Due to the volatility of markets, being able to flexibly adjust your production is more important than ever. Based on the concept of market-oriented production, it must be possible to ramp products and production volumes up and down at your various locations. In order to be able to react to such requirements, you must have increasingly flexible production systems that can operate without special equipment such as individual soldering frames.”
“Our fully automatic THT production line shows how efficient electronics production works today,” summarizes Philipp Fischer. On this line, machines from different manufacturers cooperate seamlessly. It also demonstrates how important close and early development partnerships and how much such projects depend on the reliability and creativity of all the companies involved. “Our long-term partner ASMPT plays a critical role in this. They supply us with precise, fast and space-saving machines as well as with functional software while giving us the degrees of freedom we need for our highly flexible and cost-efficient production. Without the machines and the know-how of ASMPT, this pioneering project would not have been possible.”
