Oct 25, 2012 
In a joint project the Danish company Danfoss Power Electronics A/S, in Hasselager, Denmark, and SIPLACE realized fully automated product changeovers and non-stop setup changes on the company's SMT lines.
Groundbreaking: controlled by the barcodes on the PCBs moving through the line - consisting of five high-flexibility SIPLACE SX2 placement machines - each machine switches placement programs and conveyor widths as needed. By combining SIPLACE software options with innovative setup concepts, a non-stop SMT production was created, featuring random feeder setup. The Danish maker of frequency inverters and power electronics thus invests in process reliability, flexibility and speed in order to guarantee to customers in the future delivery times lower than 24 hours – despite an ever-rising product range. Nicki Holm, Danfoss Power Electronics A/S project manager, is very content with the result:
"We are very pleased with this jointly developed solution. The new line is so efficient that we don’t just run the scheduled jobs on the new line, but also products from other lines. This provides us with much more scheduling freedom - an important factor in a plant that can normally plan only one shift ahead."
Basis for the innovative solution is a SMT line with five SIPLACE SX placement machines. Four of them hold two SIPLACE MultiStar placement heads each, which switch between different placement modes during each pick-up cycle, therefore being able to place a wide range of components without any kind of adjustments having to be performed. As an End-of-Line placer for odd shape components, the fifth SIPLACE SX2 is equipped with two SIPLACE TwinHead placement heads.
Automatic adjustment of conveyor widths
Danfoss uses barcodes on PCBs in order to coordinate processes beginning with SMT production and ending with language and country specific design of final products. The new SIPLACE line helps to close a gap: the system on the new line reads the barcodes on the PCBs and downloads the corresponding placement programs (stationwise download), but it also uses the information to automatically adjust the conveyor rails of the five SIPLACE machines.
Non-stop random setup
By using intelligent SIPLACE X feeders and state-of-the-art SIPLACE software, Danfoss furthermore introduced SIPLACE Random Setup. Instead of setup changeovers being performed with previously prepared changeover tables after the line has run empty, upcoming products can be set up during the production process.
This innovative interplay of hardware, software and processes has enabled Danfoss to produce non-stop since May 2012. In the highly automated and software supported SMT production setup mistakes have widely been eliminated.
At the beginning of 2011, the SIPLACE team (formerly Siemens Electronics Assembly Systems) became a business unit of ASM Pacific Technology and operates now as ASM Assembly Systems. With its SIPLACE machines and innovative manufacturing concepts, ASM Assembly Systems GmbH & Co. KG is the world’s leading manufacturer of surface mount technology (SMT) placement machines and solutions. Since its beginnings in 1985, the company has installed almost 35,000 placement machines at over 3,500 customers all over the world. Electronics manufacturers in all industries such as telecommunications, automotive, IT, consumer electronics and automation use and depend on SIPLACE's broad portfolio of solutions and services.
