Electronics from coal
07 October 2006
Scottish coal mines were replaced by Silicon Glen in the 70s and 80s, only for a large part of the electronics industry to migrate east during the last decade. However, the electronics industry is far from dead. Tim Fryer went to visit one company whose background has a foot firmly planted in both the coal and electronics industries.
Scotland was originally a gateway to Europe for the US electronics giants and the legacy of Silicon Glen was the birth of an indigenous, and sustainable, Scottish electronics industry. Scotland, however, owes is industrial heritage to a more obvious resource - coal - and it was out of this industry that Kelvinside Electronics was born.
The 1980's were, of course, a bad time for the mining industry in the UK, but British companies were still relied on to provide the equipment for the rest of the world. One of these major suppliers was Anderson Strathclyde and it was when the electronics division was splintered away in a MBO that Kelvinside was formed. Originally Kelvinside's main customer was Anderson Strathclyde, but the decline in mining forced the company to look for new markets. Its expertise in intrinsically safe equipment made the booming oil and gas industry an early obvious target and the company has since diversified into automotive, medical and other markets that require complex, low/medium volume products and a good deal of customer contact.
Ian Ferguey, Kelvinside's Technical Director, believes his company has got the right mix for the UK market. "We all know that the volume market is not going to come back to Scotland," he commented. "But I can't see anything that we are doing at the moment being taken off-shore." For example, some of Kelvinside's local customers actually require a dedicated part of the factory for their products, such as large microwave analysers that are used in electricity generator stations and dedicated coating booths for military applications.
Other customers have a more international pedigree. Solectron for example use Kelvinside Electronics for some of its 'non-core-competency' processes, which includes NPI work and some cable assembly manufacture. These contracts are not just from Solectron's nearby Dunfermline plant but for other global Solectron locations as well.
Another global name is Thales, whose Optronics division uses Kelvinside for PCB assembly for its military products. The contract also includes a high functional and environmental test content - a liquid nitrogen chamber being required for the ESS testing. This is typical of Kelvinside's work - high value and requiring a considerable amount of engineering knowledge. Another example is the RF test requirements for the EADS contract that cost little short of œ0.5M, equipment that can now be added to Kelvinside's portfolio of techniques.
Another new investment is an x-ray machine from phoenix|x-ray. The driver for this was the high BGA content on customers' boards. Ferguey explained: "We used to outsource our x-ray inspection when there was one BGA on a board, but as BGA came to the fore, and we started to see more products with high BGA count - often ten or more on a card we decided to bring the capability inhouse."
The machine selected was the Phoenix Analyser 160, supplied and supported by Contax. "We did have a look at cheaper models," said Ferguey, "but we were not getting the repeatability. Some of the machines were showing voids that didn't show up on a subsequent inspection. Image quality and repeatability are the most important factors - all suppliers quoted us similar specifications but the proof is in the pudding."
In this case the pudding that provided the proof was Jabil. "Jabil had done a global evaluation and come up with the Phoenix machine. The operators there were particularly knowledgeable about x-ray and enthusiastic about this machine. That convinced us this was the right decision," commented Ferguey.
The phoenix Analyser is configured with the oblique view with highest magnification (OVHM) to enable angular views of the object, an anti-collision facility and the automatic BGA and void inspection capability. In addition there are the facilities to inspect the "wire sweep" of bond wires and the analysis of internal layers within a PCB using the multi layer module. The quality review package provides a clear visual display of inspection results. The Analyser has a total magnification of almost 13,000 times with a geometric magnification greater than 2,000 times. This produces clear, repeatable images of details down to 200nm when fitted with the standard x-ray tube. Finer details can be viewed with a Nanofocus tube fitted.
Contax organised two days training on the new machine and now three people can operate it. "We are not using the x-ray to its full potential," admitted Ferguey, "but that was never our intention. Its purpose was to verify BGA placement, and now we can do that for all the boards we produce."
This last point is one of the principles of the company. Ferguey said: "We have always worked to the highest standard demanded of us by any customer and then tried where possible to use this standard for all the rest of the work we do." Examples of this include the use of the Diagnosys and Yestek Automated Optical Inspection machines that used to occupy a regular slot in the automated SMT lines. However these have been removed from the lines and are stand-alone so that now all boards are AOI tested.
Another example is cleaning. Although the company uses no-clean fluxes, some of the military boards required a specified level of cleanliness. Kelvinside installed a Kerry wash system and now run all boards through it, whether they are military or not.
An obvious exception to the philosophy has come with the advent of lead-free soldering. Due to the nature of its customers' markets the majority of the products Kelvinside produces are exempt from RoHS legislation, but there needs to be two full SMT lines to cover the different processes. As batch sizes are low, the split in workload caused by having a lead-free process doesn't lead to any scheduling problems on the lines. Ferguey said: "Although our old line is used constantly, the new line is only currently being used about 20% of the time. This is not a problem for us - machine uptime is not an issue. What is important is machine availability when we do need them and particularly the quality of fine pitch assembly processes."
The lines both feature DEK printers, Assembleon GEM-line placement machines and ERSA reflow ovens. However, the assembly throughput is not a big issue compared to the Test remits. EADS, for example have specifications which require six hours of functional test per card. Consequently it is savings in test times that are far more significant than assembly speeds. Kelvinside is using LabVIEW test software for this reason and has not only saved time in programme generation, it has also reduced test times considerably. The EADS Tests have now reduced to one hour - a double saving as the test had to be replicated either side of an environmental test. Techniques like this and investments, such as the phoenix x-ray machine, are constantly increasing Kelvinside Electronics' technical capability and enabling it to successfully grow in Scotland's new look Silicon Glen.
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