Multiple fluids. Multiple ejectors. Dual heads. Higher speeds. Put together, all of these enhancements mark the beginning of a new era for jet printing.
Founded by Pedersen’s father nearly thirty years ago, GP Elektronik began in Odense, Denmark as a small CAD design bureau specializing in PCBs. In a recent interview, GP Elektronik’s General Manager and CEO, Anders Bo Pedersen explains how the
MY700 jet printer is a perfect fit for the company’s vision to combine the best in quality, flexibility and now higher volume production.
“Today we use two production lines, with one MY700 Jet Printer in each line, and we focus on running a good business, making good products and having some fun with the best equipment along the way,” says Pedersen.
Mainstream ready
With the MY700 jet printer and dispenser, Pedersen is confident that the technology is ready for mainstream, higher volume production. In particular, its dual ejector heads, dual lanes and multiple ejector sizes have opened up opportunities to produce larger batches for a number of fast-growing customers.
“The speed increase with the MY700 gives us a lot more headroom to grow with our customers’ demands. And there’s a lot of versatility with the small, medium and big dots with the three different ejectors. The largest gives you 100% more paste volume in one dot, so the biggest impact in our production capability in terms of speed has definitely been the large dot ejector.”
Rising batch sizes, rising throughput
This ability to scale production quickly and seamlessly is becoming increasingly important for GP Elektronik as the gap between the smallest and largest batches continues to grow. Just a few years ago, Pedersen explains, longer series production was relatively rare, “but now batches of 5,000 fairly complex boards are not uncommon.”
“With the MY700 jet printer the production is very stable and we have very few stoppages. It’s complex to calculate the actual figures, but by the end of the day the throughput increase is maybe 40 %, depending on the application type and component mix. With a different mix you could easily raise that to 50–70 %.”
Complex designs with total freedom
For many manufacturers, the advent of highspeed solder paste jet printing opens up entirely new possibilities for replacing current stencil printing techniques with a more flexible, software-driven solution.
“The design freedom is completely different than with screen printing. We can make much more complex designs without making the production process more complex. This helps as we are seeing a growing mix of high-power boards, and fine-pitch BGAs and other small components. So you can design with 102 resistors close to a big D2 pack, high-power LEDs, or pin-in-paste components right next to 0004 LEDs.”
A mature technology with stable hardware gives endless potential
In their current applications, GP Elektronik mainly relies on a single solder paste dot size for both ejector heads in their MY700s. Still, Pedersen remains excited about the ability to apply a range of other assembly fluids in the future.
Pedersen now looks forward to the next big shift in contract manufacturing, where software automation will play an even greater role.
“The hardware stability gives us so many possibilities to adapt new parameters to try new things. Now that the MY700 is a rock-solid hardware platform, the sky is the limit on what you can do with software updates,” Pedersen concludes.
