Authored By:
Theron Lewis, Robin Hou, Wayne Zhang, Grady Wang, Feng Xue
IBM Corporation
Jason Keeping, Sophia Feng, Ke Zhang, ChangQing Huang
Celestica
Summary
With the increased material and labor cost, and the higher quality expectation from customers, automation has been widely considered for high volume or high mix production in the EMS industry for continuous improvement of the production efficiency, capacity, and quality.
Meanwhile, with the evolution of Smart Manufacturing, AI solutions has been readily available and could be integrated into the overall automation process to further improve the production operation.
This paper discusses the challenges in implementing such automation processes. It introduces an example of the solution for such implementation, including: the strategy of overall tooling and fixture design to support the automation, the process and equipment upgrade to accommodate the automation flow for both front end to back-end processes, and implementation of AI solution to support automatic visual inspection for back end assembly.
Conclusions
This paper introduced the end-to-end development and deployment example of an automation and AI solution for a HVLM electronic card assembly, as well as the evaluation plan and qualification to support the mass production. The example in this paper demonstrated, automation and AI could be successfully applied to electronic card assembly for operation efficiency, capacity, and quality improvement, with proper strategic planning, process flow and tooling design, machine upgrade, digitalization with data collection and AI model deployment, and thorough evaluation and qualification.
Initially Published in the SMTA Proceedings
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