CIMS technology in PCB assembly

The important processing equipment in the PCBA industry is a computer controlled automated production equipment. These automated processing equipment require programmers to spend a considerable amount of time on data preparation and programming before producing a printed circuit board (PCB), and most of the electronics manufacturers, especially high-tech enterprises with independent development and design capabilities, have the characteristics of fast product update, multi-variety and small batch production, this require short production preparation time and long effective production time of the processing equipment, to meet the requirements of the above production characteristics and shorten the cycle of product research and development. 

How to establish organic information integration and sharing between CAD design system and automated production equipment, that is, connect the "automation island" of design automation and production automation on the information flow, and removed the "partition wall" between product design and product manufacturing. It is the problem that computer integrated manufacturing system (CIMS) technology has to solve.

In the PCBA industry, the entity of the CIMS system is built on the factory computer network and database. It is a paperless manufacturing information system that can improve the quality, capability and output of circuit assembly. The system can control and monitor assembly line equipment such as screen printing machines, dispensers, Surface Mount System, plug-in machines, and test equipment. In the event of a problem, CIMS can feed the information back to the operator or process engineer and indicate the exact location of the problem.

A relatively complete CIMS system should have the following four elements:

 
First, the system needs to integrate CAD and computer-aided manufacturing (CAM) information, which is the most basic part of the CIMS system. The integration of information between the automated design and the automated manufacturing subsystems can help automate the conversion of CAD data to the manufacturing data required by the production equipment, that is automatic programming. This feature makes product conversion on the production line quite easy. Once the online product has the conversion requirements, it can be automatically reflected into the machine program, test data and documents through the CIMS system, without having to program or modify each device individually, this means that product conversions need hours or even days in the past, but now can be achieved in a few minutes.
 

Second, CIMS should provide tools for manufacturability analysis and testability analysis. Through the manufacturability analysis of CAD files from the design department, feedback of the violation of the placement rules to the design system can promote the parallel engineering of the design and manufacturing system, improve the success rate of the design, and the testability analysis tool provides designers with a complete measurable rate analysis report to properly and efficiently arrange test and test resources, and helps design engineers improve the testability design of the product.

Third, CIMS can provide reference for production schedule. Through comprehensive analysis parameters such as product to be assembled, machine occupancy rate, delivery cycle requirements, etc., the system will maximize production assembly efficiency. CIMS can be used for direct short scheduling, but also on the capacity of the plant for long-term strategic considerations.
 
Finally, CIMS should contribute to the balance of the production line and process optimization. A major feature of CIMS is the optimization of the assembly by automatically balance product loading and sorting, component distribution and placement, and the speed of the equipment. At the same time, the system should be able to reasonably choose between dispensing parts to the right machine or hand-assembling.
 
Recently, SMT technology is rapidly being adopted in the Chinese PBCA industry. In recent years, it has introduced tens of thousands of advanced SMT automation production lines. These production line equipments are basically computer-controlled automation equipment, which has created favorable conditions for the implementation of CIMS projects in the PCBA industry.