PASADENA, CA — Through regular exchanges of industry perspectives, long-standing strategic supply chain partners Supplyframe and Jabil, a global manufacturing solutions provider, have developed insights indicating that the electronics supply chain’s new normal is neither new nor unusual. Disruption may ebb, but it is, and has always been, present in the electronics supply chain. Mixed end-market signals and difficulty forecasting demand, paired with the pandemic, have evolved from a black swan event into a black swarm of events. New supply chain approaches and intelligence sources are needed to navigate the electronics ecosystem amid the swarm.

Stalling automobiles

In 2021, the global chip shortage robbed automakers of an estimated $210 billion in revenue, according to AlixPartners. Automotive microcontrollers often have lead times of a year or more. Other automotive-grade semiconductors are also constrained, with lead times averaging over nine months, according to Jabil and Supplyframe.

Automotive-grade integrated circuits remain significantly restrained, with lead times averaging between 40 and 60 weeks, the partners say. Commodity IQ analysis from Supplyframe indicates that significant to severe constraints of complex semiconductors such as automotive microcontrollers will persist into the first half of 2023.

The partners add that contingent labor availability and cost issues, in addition to decreasing but still elevated logistics and raw material costs, continue to plague semiconductor production operations. Climate change, geopolitical upheaval, and a global shortage of electrical engineering talent further add to the black swarm.

Supply chain impacts on electronics design

The 2022 Lifecycle Insights Electronics Design for Resilience (EDfR) Study commissioned by Supplyframe parent company Siemens revealed most engineers regularly must remove and replace electronic components from designs due to supply chain issues.

Over 30% of the respondents indicated their company must replace components between five and 20 times per design. An incredible 99% said they are executing spot buys, with 15% doing so daily. Another 9% reported spot buys on an hourly basis due to late-stage component supply chain issues. And nearly half of the study participants reported that they saw their approved vendor lists grow by 10% or more in 2022.

Initiating real-time, real-world change

Jabil and Supplyframe believe organizations must lay the foundation for resilience by treating commodity/category management as equally important to transactional sourcing; ensuring short-term wins are not at the expense of long-term needs; reducing cognitive overload by viewing partners and ecosystems as strategic imperatives; and investing in third-party, real-time predictive analytics and demand-forecasting solutions.

“Beyond such arrangements as producing custom chips with partners for future supply assurance in the automotive space, manufacturers across industries must address the daily as well as the strategic challenges of component availability, lead times, and pricing dynamics to build resilience into their supply chains,” added Frank McKay, senior vice president, chief supply chain and procurement officer at Jabil. “It’s clear that they require objective market-in analytics and analysis to augment their enterprise information and move from fragmented data culled from multiple, often inconsistent and stale data sources.”

“It’s time for OEMs and other electronic components buyers to move beyond biased, incomplete, spreadsheet-based datasets that focus on web pricing and factory lead times,” said Supplyframe Chief Marketing Officer Richard Barnett. “Instead, they should collaborate with manufacturing partners and solution providers with deep domain experience to receive holistic and real-world views of their supply chains. Companies with access to commodity-level intelligence can respond to changing market conditions, more thoughtfully select which components and materials to design into their products and align sourcing teams to ensure supply is available when and where it is needed. This will better position them for fluctuating demand, lower their costs, and reduce their risk of product delays while affording advanced protection from the next, inevitable black swarm.”

About Supplyframe

Supplyframe’s unmatched industry ecosystem, and pioneering Design-to-Source Intelligence (DSI) Solutions, are transforming how people and businesses design, source, market, and sell products across the global electronics value chain. Leveraging billions of continuous signals of design intent, demand, supply, and risk factors, Supplyframe’s DSI Platform is the world’s richest intelligence resource for the electronics industry. Over 10 million engineering and supply chain professionals worldwide engage with our SaaS solutions, search engines, and media properties to power rapid innovation and optimize in excess of $140 billion in annual direct materials spend. Supplyframe is headquartered in Pasadena, Calif., with offices in Austin, Belgrade, Grenoble, Oxford, San Francisco, Shanghai, and Shenzhen. To join the Supplyframe community, visit supplyframe.com and follow us on LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram, and YouTube.

Managing a surface-mount assembly line, or factory floor, through a centralised software environment makes perfect sense, in theory. In practice, however, high-level third-party line- management packages can struggle to collect and aggregate data coming in dissimilar, proprietary formats from machines produced by different brands.

Maintaining compatibility between the software and these different data-interface specifications is always difficult, as vendors publish updates independently without reference to the third-party software vendors. Although most support industry-standard equipment interfaces such as SECS/GEM, these allow only basic communication. Moreover, the most widely recognised line- management software is expensive and modules must usually be purchased individually.

Facing such challenges, some electronic manufacturing businesses see benefits in committing to one brand for printing, placement and inspection and may use the vendor’s own smart factory tools to gain overall visibility and control. On the other hand, some value the freedom to choose equipment from various brands and find their own way to manage and optimise the machines in their lines.

In either case, the landscape is changing. The world is becoming increasingly focused on Big Data to guide decision making and drive continuous improvement. It works because the computing power to handle vast quantities of process data is more affordable than ever, as is the bulk memory needed for data storage. In addition, the data science to generate actionable insights from the captured information is growing quickly. Manufacturing businesses need to take advantage of these tools to maximise equipment performance and minimise errors, and thus continue increasing their productivity.

The Value of SMT Management Software

An effective SMT line and factory management software package enables manufacturers to visualise operating quality status, monitor SMT lines in real-time, identify the causes of problems and failures, and resolve problems that may occur in any line.

Operators attending to machines in the factory need information at the line level to assess operating status, recover machine errors, and restore production. Team leaders, on the other hand, need information about all the factory’s SMT lines to monitor overall progress, stay appraised of Operational Equipment Effectiveness (OEE), and handle any machine issues, as well as dealing with defective products. Engineers and floor leaders acting at a strategic level need analytics applications to help them take the lead on OEE, identify the causes of any problems or failures, and continuously improve and optimize machine settings. Finally, business managers need high-level information to confirm the status of the line at any given time, give instructions, plan future capital investment, and report to the top management.

Yamaha’s printing, placement, and inspection systems collect and share data that enables cutting-edge analytics to reveal deeper insights into process performance when combined with advanced graphical user-interface design.

Working with this data, the YSUP Dashboard application provides easy visual access to line-level and floor-level performance data such as OEE indices. There are also more powerful analytics tools that provide deeper analysis of printing, placement, and soldering process performance. These enable users to view trends, as well as correlations between process metrics such as pickup and placement accuracy that can help fine-tune equipment and processes, as well as identifying any defects and quickly diagnosing the causes. Aided by powerful imaging tools, Dashboard can also help analyse exceptional incidents on an individual basis and determine the most appropriate corrective action.

Factory, Line, and Process Monitoring

The floor monitor tool shows individual availability, performance, and quality - the composite parts that make up the familiar Overall Equipment Effectiveness (OEE) metric - for each line in the factory. The OEE is calculated from these and displayed, as well as the pickup rate, defect rate, and the end of line yield. All are colour coded to allow easy at-a-glance assessment.

The line monitor view (figure 2) provides a more detailed picture of each line’s performance including batch progress and the job end time, with assembly ID and production-lot information. The ability to see pickup accuracy and placement accuracy simultaneously helps viewers determine the origin of component-placement defects, helping to direct remedial action such as feeder maintenance or nozzle cleaning.

Additionally, for the first time, printing and solder-paste inspection (SPI) analysis are integrated within the environment. At a glance, the user can view the results at line level. Subsequently, clicking through shows analysis of print condition and inspection results for each individual pad. It is also possible to view print trends such as alignment analysis, inspect the relationships between print results and parameters including pressure, squeegee speed, and separation speed in the same window, and examine the timing of print events such as paste replenishment, cleaning cycles, and print-error indicators. This information is available even when SPI data is not present. Together, these Dashboard features help users identify the causes of any printing defects extremely quickly and with pinpoint accuracy.

The Dashboard software helps users take advantage of inspection images to assist troubleshooting. All inspection images, for each unit produced, are stored and can be retrieved within Dashboard to assist the investigation of any defects. Viewing process data such as print and pickup information, alongside the image information, can help users identify the causes of defects that would otherwise require hours of manual analysis to track down. The following examples of failure analysis show how the use of Dashboard highlights process performance and enables operators to investigate or discount various events and focus their troubleshooting to deliver the greatest return.

Inspection-Assisted Failure analysis

Upon inspecting a production board after reflow, a surface- mounted connector was found to have rotated a few degrees during production. Analysis using Dashboard tools confirmed the shift in position, and helped pinpoint the cause by comparing the pickup rate for the connector against other components and identifying the time when the defect began to occur. This enabled the manufacturing team to cure the problem by readjusting the pickup offset. Subsequently, they were able to confirm that no further defects occurred.

Similarly, data from pre-reflow inspection identified alignment errors among 0402 chip resistors placed in a 2 x 4 array. Using solder mark recognition, the misalignment was detected as being greatest in the upper left portion of the array, becoming smaller towards the lower right. Using the All Image Tracer to assess the solder-mark image that was used as the reference to align the resistors, showed that the mark had been incorrectly recognised. Correcting the centre position of the mark cured the chip-resistor misalignment.

Using the All Image Tracer, the YSUP Dashboard tools also helped identify unusual problems such as the presence of foreign objects on the board surface and on the body of a component, as well as isolated issues such as a component supplied with a bent lead. Without these advanced tools, the causes of such defects would have taken a great deal of time and effort to find and rectify.

Conclusion

Big Data is ready to transform electronics manufacturing, with the potential to drive surface-mount assembly to higher levels of throughput and quality. However, some familiar barriers can hinder data exchange between manufacturing equipment and manufacturing management software. Yamaha, with its ONE STOP SMART SOLUTION, has shown how these barriers can be eliminated. Building on this, the latest generation of software tools are now emerging to deliver more valuable and actionable insights into factory, line, and process performance than ever before.

About Yamaha Robotics SMT Section

Yamaha Surface Mount Technology (SMT) Section, a subdivision of Yamaha Motor Robotics Business Unit in Yamaha Motor Corporation, produces a complete selection of equipment for high-speed inline electronic assembly. This 1 STOP SMART SOLUTION includes solder paste printers, component mounters, 3D solder paste inspection machines, 3D PCB inspection machines, flip-chip hybrid placers, dispensers, intelligent component storage, and management software.

Bringing the Yamaha way to electronics manufacturing, these systems prioritize intuitive operator interaction, efficient coordination between all inline processes, and modularity enabling users to meet the latest manufacturing demands. Group competencies in servo-motor control and image recognition for vision (camera) systems ensure extreme accuracy with high speed.

The current product line includes the latest YR equipment generation, with advanced automated features for programming, setup, and changeovers, and new YSUP management software with state-of-the-art graphics and built-in data analytics. Combining design and engineering, manufacture, sales, and service competencies, Yamaha SMT Section ensures operational efficiency and easy access to support for customers and partners. With regional offices in Japan, China, Southeast Asia, Europe and North America, the company provides truly global presence.

www.yamaha-motor-robotics.eu