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From complexity to competitivity

Tailored open CAM system for more efficiency and high productivity
From complexity to competitivity

As a leader in the manufacture of quality quick-turn small series and prototype PCBs, Ilfa manufactures anything from simple single-sided products up to the most technologically advanced 32-layer multilayers and 28-layer rigid-flex circuits. Its wide variety of materials and products makes its business potentially very complex, so a decade ago, the company decided to pull its many products, materials, systems and processes together into a single integrated automatic production system. This now enables their CAM engineers to work incoming customer data and generate all the files, tooling and data that are necessary for production, at the click of a mouse.

Sylvia Liemer and Dieter Guthardt, ILFA Feinstleitertechnik GmbH,

At the heart of the integrated system is Ucam, the PCB industry’s most open CAM system, and the one with the greatest potential for automation. Using HyperTool, Ucam’s automation programming language, the company has tailored the system to its very specific needs to bring order, efficiency and high productivity to the company’s high product mix business.
Sylvia Liemer, CAM/ Engineering Manager, and Dieter Guthardt, Software R&D Engineer, explains: As a leader in the manufacture of quality quick-turn small series and prototype PCBs, we are perhaps unique in Europe for the exceptional variety of our products. This includes anything from simple single- sided products up to the most technologically advanced 32-layer multilayers and 28-layer rigid-flex circuits. We currently have a library of more than 5000 widely varying stackups, a number that grows daily, and a product range that uses a multitude of materials, components, technologies and techniques to satisfy some 7000 orders a year. These come in from clients in sectors as diverse as medical, aerospace, military, automotive and general industry. All of this makes our business extremely complex in terms of logistics, materials, products and processes, so our manual and automatic operations must be combined as intelligently and efficiently as possible.
We started automating our processes about a decade ago. At that time, we had a limited version of Ucam which had actually come to us as the controlling software for our Barco laser plotter. After early experiments with it showed that it was capable of doing far more for us than our existing Lavenir CAM system, Ucam was naturally among the systems we chose to benchmark when it came to investing in new CAM seats. After careful consideration we chose it above all the other candidates for its openness and its greater potential for automation, and we’ve never looked back. Today, we have 15 full Ucam seats in our CAM/Engineering department and 3 reduced seats for the technical sales and drill/rout departments. Without this solution, we would probably never have been able to build the business we have today.
We first opted for the standard Ucam package, and it proved ideal for our standard CAM jobs. But we quickly realised that we could get far more from the system by using it to automate our systems. As this was before the days of Visual HyperScript, the current entry-level easy-to-use automation package, the route forward was to learn and use HyperTool, the deep-reaching automation language. Like Ucam, this is heavily based on Java: a fast, easy, open, universally-used standard that is currently the most powerful programming language out there. The benefits of this are huge, as it means that automation is an integral part rather than being the add-on feature that it is for other CAM systems. It also means that Ucam can be relatively easily accessed and altered to suit the needs of whoever is using it. Indeed it is so open that it does not distinguish between Ucamco’s original code and ours – to the point that the casual observer would be hard-pressed to recognise our own Ucam system as such: when we switch it on, a bespoke Ilfa GUI appears that has been especially tailored to our specific needs.
The company’s first experiences with Hypertool included the automation of job data input and linkage to the ERP system. With Ucamco’s help, we also automated plotting by using a standard naming protocol that contained a great deal of information about each layer: a principle that we subsequently applied to many other downstream processes. Then 7 years ago as part of the company’s push to automate further, Dieter joined from the Gerber company, bringing with him a wealth of experience in PCB manufacturing software. One of his first tasks was to update the plotter automation language. Then we went to work on linking Ucam with our then standalone Product Engineering Database, which contains an enormous amount of information about our products and clients. This was an essential step as our CAM engineers were then accessing the Product Engineering Database and Ucam in parallel to read data from one into the other – a time-consuming, painstaking and potentially error-ridden task. We used Hypertool to link the two so that with minimal tweaking, our engineers could quickly and automatically set up jobs. We have since pulled all of our systems into a single integrated whole, automating our processes wherever it makes sense. Now, with a single click of a mouse, this single system automatically generates files, tooling and data for processes such as routing, drilling, plotting, LDI, electrical test and AOI. And because it’s an intelligent self-learning system, it takes what it knows about a product, a board or a material, and applies this to the task at hand. For example, over the years, the system has downloaded plenty of data from our x- ray drilling machines about the dimensional behaviour of the materials we use, so it factors this in when generating drill files. Similarly, it takes into account the fact that different layers in the same board may require different design rule checks for AOI.
And the work is ongoing. Whenever a manual CAM task becomes repetitive, Dieter steps in to enable its automation and integration into the system. Similarly, we are constantly integrating new products and manufacturing capabilities, as well as new hard- and software so that they are supported by the system. All of this has streamlined our CAM function enormously. We spend 30 minutes less on each order, which, when you consider that we receive between 30 and 60 orders a day, is phenomenal. And it’s reduced the potential of errors to an absolute minimum as well as freeing up our engineers to focus on essential complex tasks such as panelisation, etch compensation and stackup combinations.
It seems almost impossible that a business as complex as ours, with such varied and seemingly incompatible products, can be integrated into a single automated production system. But thanks to Ucamco’s unwavering support and Ucam, we have been able to do just that, and to thrive in our fiercely competitive marketplace.

zusammenfassung
Im Artikel ist zu lesen, wie ein Leiterplattenhersteller für Kleinserien und Prototypen seine breite Vielfalt an Materialien und Produkte handelt, indem er sämtliche Daten in einem integrierten automatischen Produktionssystem verwaltet. Die auf die speziellen Bedürfnisse zugeschnittene Lösung ermöglicht einen höheren Automatisierungsgrad für mehr Produktivität und Effizienz trotz hohem Produktmix.
Dans cet article, on peut lire comment un fabricant de circuits imprimés utilise pour des petites séries et des prototypes, son vaste assortiment de matériaux et de produits en gérant toutes les données dans un système de production automatique intégré. Les solutions taillées sur mesure par rapport aux besoins permettent un niveau d’automatisation plus élevé pour plus de productivité et d’efficacité malgré le mélange de produits.
Current Issue
Titelbild EPP EUROPE Electronics Production and Test 11
Issue
11.2023
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