Interview - Bjorn Dahle, KIC

Bjorn Dahle

Q1. Walking around a major trade show like Apex or Nepcon, we see a lot of the blue KIC ON BOARD signs at various oven manufacturers and solder suppliers. What is KIC’s involvement with these companies, and what value do you provide them?

A1. KIC develops thermal process tools to help electronic manufacturers improve quality, productivity and traceability. KIC creates a win-win situation for the equipment and material suppliers and their customers. Oven manufacturers are today building very good and stable machines. KIC compliments their offerings with value-added solutions for process traceability, documentation capabilities and a higher level of automation. The electronic manufacturers achieve improved production quality and productivity while they exceed their clients’ demand for process traceability, lower cost and more. The material suppliers, who often get blamed for poor soldering results, can help their customers reach the desired yield through improved in-spec processes.

Q2. What do you see as major future trends in the industry in the areas where KIC is engaged?

A2. The first major trend is automation. Our industry’s relentless drive for lower cost is forcing better equipment utilization through more equipment uptime, faster throughput, optimized processes etc. This means eliminating many of the remaining manual tasks, such as periodic profiling, while optimizing the thermal processes to avoid drifting in and out of spec.

Secondly, the trend towards ‘green’ manufacturing has already started with the RoHs and lead-free conversion. Electronic manufacturers will as a consequence require better process tools to manage the tighter thermal process window. They are also starting to look at ways to reduce energy use in their factories. The reflow ovens, wave solder machines and other thermal machines are very energy intensive.

Finally, the demand for more process documentation and traceability will continue to build. EMS clients’ whose names are on the final product want security that the quality is there, not only upon delivery, but for the lifetime of the product. The thermal process has historically been a black box, but due to the wide process window an occasional spot check with a manual profiler was ample. In the future, manufacturers will need to show documentation for daily spot checks, and in more and more applications even that will not even be enough. The clients demand process traceability to verify that each and every product was produced within the thermal process window established.

KIC is involved in all of these trends with technologies for process optimization, automatic profiling systems, process traceability systems and more.

Q3. When we met at Apex in Los Angeles this year, you started talking about ‘data acquisition’ versus ‘data intelligence.’ What does that mean?

A3. This is a method to classify various product capabilities. Our electronic manufacturing industry has matured over the last several years, and as a result it has seen machinery become faster, more accurate and stable, more reliable etc. Today’s technological developments tend to be more software based. Such as making production and process information more readily available, which in turn helps the electronic manufacturers run a much more effective operation that will lower their production cost while improving quality. A very good example of that is the thermal process software. One thing is to put a data acquisition box through an oven once a week and retrieve data on peak temperature, slope, soak etc. That is important but of limited value. What I call pure ‘data acquisition.’

Additional value is created, however, when you can grab the acquired data, and deliver them in real time to the relevant personnel in a format that help them to make better production decisions. In addition, the data can be retrieved automatically and continuously, and hence automatic systems can be developed to make real-time decisions for the engineers when required. For example, the system can shut down a feed conveyor the instant an out of spec situation occurs, or if an out of control process is detected.

KIC has developed tools that will automatically ‘google’ the billions of alternative oven recipes to select the most appropriate for each application. This ‘search engine’ makes its selection within a few seconds to reduce set up time. To illustrate how far this technology has come, we are about to introduce a new capability to optimize on energy use. The system will within seconds select the oven recipe that consumes the lowest level of energy to produce an in spec product.

In addition we have automatic profiling systems that measure the profile for each and every production board and provide full process traceability. These are examples of the higher value ‘data intelligence’ tools.

TG: Bjorn, thank you very much.

Trevor Galbraith interviewed Bjorn Dahle and
KIC product manager Mark Vininski, at their
booth at APEX in February. Visit “Video Central”
in the left sidebar on our website at
www.globalsmt.net to watch the video.

Reprinted with permission from Global SMT, May 2007