Siplace president Tilo Brandis optimistically explains during the last press conference, “We expect a market share of about 34.8 % in the worldwide SMT highend market, coming from 33.1 %”. This is even more interesting in light of slightly declining market volume, from 2004 (total 1.6bn euro) to approximately 1.58 bn in 2005 for this equipment area. For 2006, the prognosis says 1.73 bn can be possible in highend SMT placement solutions.
Something to remember: Siplace, the brand name of Electronics Assembly Systems (EA) of Siemens, is now again part of the huge division Automation and Drives (A&D), as it was already some years ago. EA is one of four A&D’s business units. In total, the division had sales revenues of about 75 bn euro in fiscal 2005 and a head count of around 460,000. The much smaller Siplace team itself works from four regional headquarters around the globe. These are the European HQs in Munich with 28 service locations, five training centers, one technical support center as well as running the R&D headquarters, and two manufacturing and engineering sites
Then there is the Americas’ HQs in Norcross/Georgia with 25 service locations, three training and two support centers, an R&D center and an assembly and engineering center. In the HQs of South-East Asia (including Japan and Korea) located in Singapore, there is a production and engineering site, an R&D and technical support center, as well as three training centers and fourteen service locations. Finally, there is a regional HQs in Shanghai for mainland China and Taiwan, running eight service locations, four training, one technical support and one assembly and engineering center.
With these impressive global activities, the company obviously feels very confident in pursuing a leading role as SMT equipment supplier as well as solution provider, having all needed resources locally at hand. Tilo Brandis describes the main trends in the SMT market in a short overview. In his estimate China now forms the largest market (about 45 % of the total sales), the ratio between CEM/ODM (contractors) customers and OEMs is in the area of 70 to 30, and the machine segment of high volume/high technology is faintly and continuously declining in its market volume (42 %), whereas all other segments such as low volume/low tech, high volume/low tech and low volume/high tech are more or less growing.
Tilo Brandis thinks that the software part in equipment and solutions will now gain an even higher importance, and because of this in many cases the effectiveness of a line can evolve without the need for costly capital investment. It’s just a software upgrade. This also allows greater freedom in line integration and in manufacturing process design.
Siplace Europe director Ray Bruce is talking about the new Siplace X-Series key features with its highlights such as the 20-nozzle collect & place head for “highest placement rate at highest placement accuracy”. Other main features are the CFC (carbon fiber) gantry supporting extreme accuracy and robustness, the vision system with fast and accurate measurements and the versatile, high-speed feeder configurations for advanced throughput.
As a result, “shortest changeover times and highest performance, as well as very high practical placement rates – independent of the product ” is one of the outstanding characteristics of the X-Series, as Ray Bruce says. According to the individual requirements, the different line concepts can be set up in an innovative way by using for example the productivity lift and dual-track configurations to allow serial or parallel lines or a mixture of these both techniques. “Those lines can be reconfigured without the moving of machines, and also to use just one paste printer and one oven for an entire complex line, for example consisting of six placement modules in total”. For the efficiency of a line and its productivity in today’s high-mix environments, the changeover time between different boards is critical. Ten years ago, as Ray Bruce thinks back, we talked of ten minutes, since machine modules had to be moved. Five years ago this has shrunk to about 5 minutes for the exchange of the placement head, and now with the full software control, the changeover time of a complete line is in the area of about one minute. Needless to say, the saved time leads to even higher assembly throughput. Gerhard B. Wolski
EPP EUROPE 404
