News
Milara Inc. (Medfield, MA), a vendor of fully and semiautomatic stencil printers for surface-mount technology and wafer applications, has introduced STW-1, a wafer printer system.
Milara takes its combined system technology practice one step further with the development of the new SemiTouch Wafer Printer system. The system is capable of both wafer stencil printing and bumping within a single system. It is molded after Milara's standard printer but by pressing a single button, the system converts itself from a wafer bumper to stencil printer in seconds.
Milara has incorporated a new vision system with accuracies of 12 µm that yields capabilities of ultra-fine-pitch printing. Using patented vibration squeegee technology, which has proven viability in wafer bumping, the system uses the same technology to accomplish ultra-fine pitch-printing (down to 70 µm) with printing reliability (no missed apertures on wafers with excess of 25,000 per print) and solder brick geometry.
Copyright 2004, UP Media Group. All rights reserved.
On Feb. 3, 2004, the SMART Group (Bucks, UK) held its 6th annual Lead-Free Seminar at Wycombe Football Club Conference Centre. Delegate numbers were finally cut-off at 173 a week before the event (another 50 engineers wanted to attend). According to the group, the exhibition area could have sold out four times over.
The Department of Trade & Industry (DTI) announced at the event that it would shortly be embarking on a whistle stop trip to the U.S. spreading the WEEE/RoHS status. Steven Andrews and Mark Downs will be speaking at four U.S. seminars, in addition to company visits and meetings and evening discussions. The two will arrive in New Jersey on Feb. 18, then move on to California, Seattle and Chicago.
The visit will complete the DTI coverage of the major markets and suppliers for electronic and electrical equipment (EEE) who have most interest in WEEE/RoHS. DTI approached American Electronics Association (AeA) to get involved with U.S. seminars, after similar initiatives were undertaken in China and Japan.
According to a survey conducted during the conference, most delegates are still conducting investigations on lead free; few had actually built demo or test boards, or selected the lead-free alloy, although most expect it to be tin/silver/copper. Help and advice is still needed, including a a help desk, hands-on experience and regular lead-free forums. When attendees were asked what was needed to get industry moving, the only positive response was for the government to give some financial help, by way of tax benefits, especially in the first year of the changeover from processing with lead solders to lead-free solders.
SMART Group is associated with LEADOUT, a European-funded scheme that will expand the SMART Group PPM Monitoring Project in a lead-free environment. In cooperation with over 20 organisations across Europe, LEADOUT will examine reliability, process change and the training needs of small and medium volume organisations.
Copyright 2004, UP Media Group. All rights reserved.
The Christopher Group (Santa Ana, CA) has announced the addition of William J. Boyle to their technical staff. Boyle, a graduate of The Catholic University of America in electrical engineering, was most recently employed as an applications engineer specializing in automatic optical inspection products at Teradyne. His responsibilities will include applications, engineering, sales and support of the Christopher Groups' inspection technology product line.
The Christopher Group provides sales, service and support of the Dainippon Screen (bare board) and NSpec (assembly) automatic optical inspection systems; HC 610 hole inspection system, and SmartOptics solder paste inspection and measurement system.
Copyright 2004, UP Media Group. All rights reserved.
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