Seven processes on one floor
Every board that leaves the plant has passed through at least one of these, and most pass through several:
- Automated assembly — pick-and-place on four SMT lines, placing six million chips per day down to 01005 and 0201 packages at 4 mil (0.1 mm) pitch, on one or both sides of the board.
- Reflow soldering — paste printed through a stencil, parts placed, then soldered in a controlled profile for fine-pitch and area-array devices.
- Wave soldering — for through-hole and mixed boards where the pin count makes hand work uneconomical.
- Selective soldering — for connectors, terminals and other parts that must not see a full wave, or on boards where the through-hole joints sit next to parts that cannot be immersed.
- Hand insertion and hand soldering — for parts no machine can place, and for the low volumes where a fixture would cost more than the labour.
- Point-to-point wiring — internal wiring between boards, connectors and terminals inside an assembly.
- Inspection — SPI before placement, AOI after reflow, X-ray for BGA, QFN and other hidden joints, and ionograph testing of ionic contamination down to ppm per square centimetre.
Inspection and rework attached to each process
Inspection is not a final gate that a batch either passes or fails. Each process carries its own check, so a placement error is caught before reflow and a soldering error before the board moves on. Rework follows the same route: BGA and micro-BGA parts are reworked and re-balled on site and verified by X-ray, and contamination that could cause electrochemical failure later is measured and removed rather than assumed away.
Where a customer needs evidence for their own quality file — automotive, medical or industrial programs — inspection results are recorded against the lot, so the program can show what was checked and which process produced it.
Assembly and everything around it
PCB assembly is offered as a standalone service and as part of a turnkey build:
- Quick-turn prototype assembly for one to fifty boards.
- Turnkey and partial turnkey assembly covering fabrication and parts as well as the assembly work.
- Consignment assembly, where the customer supplies the components.
- Component sourcing, so a complete BOM is quoted and bought as one order.
- Inspection and test from SPI and AOI through to in-circuit, flying probe and functional test.
- Box build and final product assembly, including conformal coating and packing.
How a build moves through the plant
Component sourcing → PCB fabrication → SMT → DIP → testing → finished product assembly. Keeping those six stages on one site removes the freight, re-packing and re-inspection that come with splitting a build across suppliers, and it means a defect found at test can be traced back to the process that produced it rather than to an anonymous shipment.
RoHS-compliant lead-free assembly is the default; non-RoHS assembly is run where a customer's design or market requires it. Process limits for a specific design are on the capability page.
