Surface mounted PCB assembly services

As electronic component packages become smaller with closer pitch leads it is necessary for a PCB assembly company such as First Choice Assembly to invest in the latest PCB manufacturing and assembly equipment to keep pace with these changes.

At First Choice Assembly we have ten Ipulse pick and place surface mount PCB assembly machines (made by Yamaha) capable of placing anything from 0201 to 54mm QFPs (quad flat packs) with a combined placement rate of upto 22,000 components per hour per machine. With the vision system on the Ipulse machine this means we can place pitches from 0.3mm and on BGAs row spacing of 0.8mm

Odd form components are easily placed using the machine’s upward vision camera. Any new component form can be taught into the library to ensure on the fly centring of the component during placement with the upward vision camera.

Due to the ease of set up these machines lend themselves to small prototype runs as well as mid volume surface mounted PCB assembly and production. For prototype runs we also have hand placement equipment that will accurately place loose parts down to 0603 upto 50mm QFPs.

First Choice Assembly have vision alignment on the screen printer ensuring repeatable and accurate screen printing of solder paste or glue making fine pitch printing easy. If you already have a solder stencil we can accommodate the use of stencils from DEK 240 to 265 (29 inch)

Pitches of down to 0.3mm are printable in production with the use of our fully automatic DEK265 screenprinter. With the aid of fiducial correction each stencil is aligned to the pcb being printed. Eliminating the stretch and shrink of the pcb which occurs on every pcb.

All the stencils we use are laser cut and optically inspected to ensure the best print definition avaliable.The stencils are made from stainless steel and tensioned by our Zelflex frameless system which uses air to keep the tension on the screen all the way through a batch of pcb assemblies.

Once the printed circuit board is assembled we have AOI (automatic optical inspection) which is used to inspect solder integrity, component orientation and also can check component values.

Please see the Quality & Packing section of our website for more details of our AOI equipment.