Siemens’ Multistar Placement Head

The Siplace Multistar CPP placement head offers high-speed chip placement and large midrange and fine-pitch device placement capability. It consists of a high-speed revolver head capable of placing up to 23,500 chips per hour, using 12 nozzles for collect/place and a digital camera on the head for vision on-the-fly. Places components from 01005 to 27 mm² using the camera on the head for component inspection and alignment. Also has an upward-looking camera in the machine, for use when placing components up to 40 x 50 mm in size. During each trip to the feeders, the patented head collects a combination of up to 12 components – large and small – from tapes, trays or tubes, and then inspects the components using the camera type that suits the component size.

For example, the novel head can collect five chip components followed by three large BGAs using patented Mixed Mode placement. This is said to save significant time because chip components are aligned and inspected using the on-the-head camera at the same time the BGAs are aligned and inspected using the upward-looking camera. After alignment, the BGAs are placed first, followed in sequence by the six chip components. The head can rotate both clockwise and counter-clockwise, which enables the mixed placement.

The head’s ability to collect and place large and small components concurrently permits the optimization software to equally distribute the workload across the heads in the line. A second, equally important, benefit is the “all-in-one” placement capability: There is seldom the need to change heads to adapt to changes in product mix.

In a typical cellphone product with a four-up panel and 1312 total components, 91% of which are small passives and the rest mostly midrange in size, with the exception of shields that get placed at the end of the line, the line output increased 19% – a cycle-time reduction of 2.5 sec. per panel. Another study looked at a board with 317 small passives on the bottom and 82 placements – mostly midrange and larger components including SOICs, tantalums, BGAs and QFPs – on the topside, run with a common feeder setup permitting either board side to run without having to exchange any feeders or trays. The head showed a 28% output increase for the topside and a 12% output increase for the bottom.

The head can be used on the Siemens X Series platform machines.

Available from Siemens Electronics Assembly, siplace.com.