Role of CAD Post-Processing in a Quality Tool for Low Volume High-Complexity Electronics Manufacture

Early recognition of defects during manufacturing of printed circuit boards is essential for optimised and efficient electronics manufacturing systems. An innovative approach and an application tool to enable real time recording and analysis of defects in electronics manufactured products in production and assembly operations have been developed by Loughborough University. The developed CLOVES system for data collection in a Contract Electronic Manufacturer (CEM) highlights the advantages in integrating industry standard data files and shows how this integration leverage support of quality and root cause analyses, and ultimately, improves the decision making process. In order to design and implement an application tool to capture defect data in real time as part of an industrial comprehensive knowledge-based tool for decision support, the use of Printed Circuit Assembly (PCA) customer information (e.g. bill of materials and CAD drawings) and production data (e.g. placement file) are required. In this article, the issues of implementing a graphical user interface by integrating various CAD data files (e. g. FATF file) to a unified data repository to support quality tasks are studied. Furthermore, the necessity of integrating electronics industry's standard data files through a vendor independent application tool is discussed and demonstrated.