Laser marking system by ROMMEL at JUMO
Despite the economic slump, JUMO has invested in a future-oriented laser marking system for electronic components. Traceability and the labeling of components do away with a product's anonymity and the different companies or even continents involved will be made transparent.
On all continents, devices and systems of JUMO are in use which measure, control and register physical quantities such as pressure, temperature and PH Redox in a wide variety of sectors and fields of activity. Within the company, the electronic manufacturing service (EMS) has established in the field of electronics production which produces high quality products on state-of-the-art production lines.
The story began in 1948, the year in which Moritz Kurt Juchheim founded the company M. K. Juchheim, in short JUMO, for the production of glass contact thermometers in Fulda. His philosophy was based on the production of precise high-quality instruments in connection with optimum service.
Investment in economically difficult times is not a matter of course, especially in the industrial sector. Despite the economic slump, JUMO has invested in a future-oriented laser marking system for electronic components.
As a result of an ever increasing division of labor it is technically no longer possible to fully trace back the origin of all individual process steps up to the final product along the value chain. In particular for security-relevant applications the number of electronic components has been rising steadily.
As a consequence, the provider of the final product faces more and more liability risks. The resulting anonymous production chain poses risks. Traceability and the labeling of components do away with a product's anonymity and the different companies or even continents involved will be made transparent.
The existing print and manual attachment of labels on electronic components is no longer necessary at the company JUMO. The possible danger that attached labels come off the printed circuit boards and thus inadmissibly modify the air path in the safety-relevant area is now a thing of the past thanks to laser marking. With the laser marking system various marking types can be used in accordance with customer requirements. Data matrix codes can represent high information density on a small area based on the special structure. The required reader devices are available and state-of-the-art technology.
The CO2 laser marking system "WL 2010 LC" delivered to Jumo was installed in the warehouse with a destacker and stacker for printed circuit boards (LBS 04 T and LBS 04 TA) as a laser offline solution. In this way, the warehousemen are able to mark the PCBs directly after receipt of goods and immediately assign them to a production order and send them to the assembly department or store the marked printed circuit boards by batch.
The laser marking system is equipped with a clearly structured and intuitive user interface which is protected via three password levels. The conversion to a new product is effected via the program start which is carried out by means of a barcode hand scanner. The code on the order documents is read out and the appropriate marking programm is called up automatically. The information on the new product is directly sent to the PCB destacker and stacker so that no additional conversion time is required.
To interlink the later marking with the available data of the PCB, a conversion control is effected at Jumo. At program start a conversion window appears on the screen via which the operator can enter the production order number, the part number, the order quantity and the quantity of PCBs to be marked. This information is then checked in a matching of data with the production information of the Jumo data base and only released if there is a data match. A counter carries out a target/actual-comparison during the marking process to guarantee that only the required number of PCBs for this order is marked.
The content of the marking to be applied is created out of the matched information and is applied onto the printed circuit board in the form of a data matrix code, barcode, plain text or a combination.
An integrated vision system effectes a fiducial measurement of the PCBs in the laser unit to achieve highest repeat accuracy. The correction is carried out by the XY axial system in the machine. Resistance against up-side-down stacking is given by the vision system so that the PCBs are not marked when the stack is loaded up side down, but a warning message is issued.
As a special function, the PCBs are sorted as "good / bad boards" by means of the vision system. Printed circuit boards which are marked with a defined bad mark are recognized by the vision system and a marking is not applied. This "non-marking" facilitates that the single PCBs are not printed and assembled in the later SDM production process which saves costs in turn.
The ROMMEL GmbH is a leading manufacturer of linking modules, automation solutions and traceability systems for the electronics and solar industry. The company which is headquartered in Ehingen, Germany, currently employs approximately 100 employees and is a 100 % subsidiary company of Mühlbauer AG.
The product portfolio of ROMMEL GmbH is divided into the sections of board handling, traceability, automation and solar technology. In all sections, offers for individual machines to complete solutions can be realized.
The field of board handling covers various options for input, transport, interim buffering and output of printed circuit boards or workpiece carriers in an SMD line.
In the field of traceability, complete solutions have been developed and realized which effect an automatic marking of the products to be manufactured with the aim to automatically document and archive the individual production processes.
For process automation and manufacturing in the field of back-end, various basis modules are available in the product line of automation. On the basis of customer requirements and automation tasks, they are correspondingly combined and developed further.
The field of solar technology is the latest product line of ROMMEL GmbH. Besides equipment for the transport of solar modules in module production, tester cells are processed as individual, customer-specific solutions.
Within the Mühlbauer AG, ROMMEL GmbH represents the technology center for board handling, traceability as well as automation and solar technology. The integration into the international sales and service network allows the company to be close to its customer offering 24h support worldwide.
