High speed LED placement on ultra long boards

Europlacer announces a new capability for high speed LED placement on ultra long boards.

The highly flexible, dual gantry IINEO II pick and place machine now provides unrivalled PCB dimensions and is capable of handling oversized PCBs up to 1610 x 600mm with a placement rate up to 27300 cph.The development is timely in response to the needs of the LED market, particularly in China, where LED panel producers are increasingly requesting one board of 1600mm instead of two boards of 800mm with connexions. The connexions pose risks of breakdown and can be problematic, ultimately reducing the quality of the product.

In order to be able to produce big boards, many contending pick and place manufacturers have compromised by sending the PCB twice to the machine or by reducing the number of feeders accordingly. Some see 800mm as futuristic and others can handle boards of 1200mm maximum but the pipette heads fail to reach the complete board. The structure of IINEO allows many board size configurations. PCB’s of 1610 x 460mm can be handled without reducing the huge feeder capacity of 264 position 8mm. By using only the front side of the machine for feeders, IINEO II still achieves 132 positions 8mm and can increase the board size to 1610 x 600m. This is a market first and with Blakell Europlacer’s concept of turret head, all heads can reach the complete board without de-rating.

The turret heads can be fitted with 8 or 12 nozzles and feature an “on the fly” vision system that can analyze components from 01005 up to 50x50mm. An increased component height of up to 34mm can be placed by the turret head. The vision algorithm developed by Europlacer can detect the correct orientation of the LED, which is fairly standard, however Europlacer’s system also ensures accurate placement by automatically rotating the placement orientation by up to 180° if an LED with wrong orientation is detected.

The IINEO II can be fitted optionally with a glue dispenser featuring a time/pressure system or paste dispenser with an Archimedean screw system, enabling the same machine to efficiently dispense conductive adhesive on the PCB before the LED placement.