Applications & Cases

Application areas

Industrial control and automation

Control boards are usually multilayer, with large copper pours and small passives on the same panel. The copper acts as a heat sink, so the board absorbs heat unevenly in reflow and you get cold joints and tombstoning. We build a reflow profile for each board based on board thickness and copper weight rather than reusing a generic profile. Through-hole parts are hand-soldered in fixtures to hold them square. Finished boards go through ICT and a burn-in run before shipment.

Power and energy metering

Meters and data concentrators are judged on long-term stability and on consistency between batches, not on any single unit. Paste volume is set by aperture design and verified board by board with SPI, to limit bridging and solder balls. Creepage and clearance in the high-voltage section are checked against the drawing before assembly. Boards are conformal coated against moisture and dust where the customer specifies it, and process parameters are recorded per batch so any unit can be traced back to how it was built.

Transport and access control

Barrier gate and card reader boards carry power drivers and relays, so the through-hole count is high and the mix of SMT and DIP on one board is heavy. We run wave or selective soldering and finish with hand soldering at the connectors, using jigs to keep headers vertical and seated. After box build, the assembly is tested on load with an FCT fixture that simulates repeated start-stop cycles rather than a single power-up.

Security and vision systems

Camera and recognition boards are dense: micro BGA, fine pitch and passives as small as 01005 imperial (0402 metric), with 0201 imperial (0603 metric) as standard. Every board goes through AOI after placement. BGA joints are checked by X-ray for voiding, bridging and open joints, since none of that is visible from the outside. Boards that fail are pulled to a separate BGA rework and IR rework station and reworked individually — they do not go back into the line flow.

IoT and wireless

Wireless module boards are sensitive around the RF section: the solder volume and position repeatability at the shield can and the antenna feed point change measured performance directly. Controlled impedance requirements are confirmed at the stack-up stage, before material is cut. The shield can is a separate process step rather than part of the general placement pass. Functional test uses the customer’s own test fixture and pass criteria.

Medical and laboratory equipment

These are low-volume boards with high requirements for cleanliness, ESD control and record keeping. All work is done on the ESD-controlled floor. Material is stored in temperature and humidity controlled conditions, and each jar of solder paste is logged for warm-up time and time in use. Once a kit is complete, a file is opened for that batch: component lot codes are matched one to one against finished unit serial numbers.

Consumer and education products

Consumer products and teaching kits ship in volume, are cost-sensitive and change over frequently. Our SMT lines are allocated by model, so a changeover on one model does not stop another. Changeover time is cut by keeping stencils and placement programs for models already built, so a repeat order does not start from zero. The back end feeds a manual assembly line for box build and packing.

Where our customers are

We supply customers in Australia, Brazil, Europe and North America, and also serve customers inside China. English and Portuguese are spoken in-house. Engineering questions, inspection reports and day-to-day email are handled in the customer’s own language, and we are used to foreign drawing conventions, file formats and acceptance practice — which removes most of the back-and-forth that usually sits between an inquiry and a quotation.

Volumes

We take work from a handful of prototype boards up to tens of thousands of units. What changes with quantity is less the price than the way the job is run: a prototype run exists to surface problems early, a production run exists to hold a process steady.

Scale	How the job is run
Prototype	Quick-turn line slot, rush stencil, engineering and production working the board together; the point of the run is to find problems at the DFM stage
Pilot / small batch	Fixed line and fixed placement program, first article inspection before continuous build, 100 percent inspection with process parameters recorded
Volume production	Dedicated line and shift scheduled, line starts only on a complete kit, hourly sampling, lot codes traceable

Process problems found during prototype and pilot builds are written into the process file for that model. When the model moves to volume, it keeps the same stencil, the same program and the same fixtures, so the build does not drift when the stage changes.