News
The monthly order index compiled by the Electronic Components, Assemblies and Materials Association (ECA, Arlington, VA) moved upward in January, confirming industry optimism during the last four months.
"The index has been moving up steadily," said Bob Willis, ECA president. "It's not the meteoric boom of the late 1990s, but we might never see that again. This is nice, manageable growth that looks like it will be sustained throughout the year."
Willis says recent news substantiates the upward trend that has been seen in the ECA order index during the last four months. For instance, ECA members, such as Vishay Intertechnology, Littelfuse and KEMET, have reported substantial revenue increases in Q4 2003 compared to Q4 2002. Also, Reuters reports that major electronics manufacturing services (EMS) companies are seeing stronger demand in 2004, helped by an improving economy and a trend to outsource personal computers, servers, cell phones, handheld computers and other electronics gear.
The ECA represents manufacturers and producers of passive and active electronic components, component arrays and assemblies, and materials and support services. It is a sector of the Electronic Industries Alliance, comprising more than 2,100 members that reportedly represent 80% of the U.S. electronics industry.
Copyright 2004, UP Media Group. All rights reserved.
AEGIS Industrial Software Corp. (Horsham, PA) and Cogiscan Inc. (Bromont, Quebec, Canada) have announced that they will demonstrate integration between their products as the Cogiscan material tracking and line control technology is integrated to Aegis' real-time machine monitoring and data acquisition systems.
The combined solution offers control of business processes from the preparation of design and bill of matrials data, to line setup validation, execution and the gathering and analysis of process data. It then yields traceability—effectively closing the informational loop. The technical integration creates the first solution offering the Aegis NPI and MES solutions with the materials and process control solutions offered from Cogiscan.
"When Aegis and Cogiscan solutions combine to create closed loop manufacturing control, it yields more than just an extended range of functions," said Jason Spera, chief executive officer of Aegis, "It delivers new depth of information management through the entire process from end-to-end. It is a platform-independent solution free of proprietary and machine-specific elements to make deployment and scalability simple."
Copyright 2004, UP Media Group. All rights reserved.
Universal Instruments Corp. (Binghamton, NY) and CyberOptics Corp. (Minneapolis, MN) have signed an agreement to integrate the new Embedded Process Verification (EPV) inspection technology from CyberOptics into Universal's electronic component placement systems.
Universal will offer the EPV sensor system as a feature on its recently released platform placement machines that incorporate its new placement head. Introduction of the sensor is currently planned for the second half of 2004.
Ian McEvoy, president of Universal, said, "To achieve the challenging quality goal of less than 10 defects per million for surface-mount circuit board assembly, you have to verify each component placement. The CyberOptics' EPV is the first sensing system to enable this within the placement machine."
Steven Case, CyberOptics' chairman and founder said, "Unlike traditional inspection systems that are positioned after the placement machine in an electronics assembly line, EPV puts the inspection process right at the point of action, inside the pick-and-place machine. Ultimately, defects detected by the EPV sensor may be corrected while the circuit board is still within the placement machine."
Universal Instruments is an electronics productivity specialist, providing circuit, semiconductor and back-end assembly technologies and equipment, integrated system solutions and process expertise to manufacturers in every sector of the electronics industry.
CyberOptics Corp., specializing in optical technology, designs and manufactures a growing range of yield and through-put enhancement tools for the surface-mount electronic assembly equipment and semiconductor fabrication equipment markets.
Copyright 2004, UP Media Group. All rights reserved.
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