Novatec Electronic Assembly Process


*Spider Printer™*

SPIDER PRINTER™, THE SELECTIVE PRINTING SYSTEM BY NOVATEC

Selective printing is at last endowed with an industrial system for the deposit of solder paste or tacky flux.

THE SPIDER PRINTER™ is a new concept of solder paste selective printing applied to populated printed circuit boards. THE SPIDER PRINTER™ brings a major evolution in terms of speed, ease of use and quality of the deposits.

FIELD OF USE

The SPIDER PRINTER™ can be used :

on assembly lines to complete the printed circuits boards,

to rework PCB's after assembly,

in aftersales services.

FUNCTIONAL ANALYSIS OF THE SYSTEM

The SPIDER PRINTER™ can be split to the following parts :

an universal arm

spider stencils which are adaptable on the arm

special squeegees

a support plate.

THE UNIVERSAL ARM :

Allows it to place the Spider Stencil in any position in the space and to maintain it in this specific position during the printing operation. An hydraulic system is used to jam the arm movements in only one operation. The arm's mobility makes it possible to print boards without dismantling them from their sub-assembly. When the printing operation is completed, the Z axis gives the possibility to achieve a progressive demoulding of the deposits. The universal arm ends on the one hand with a system to tension the micro stencils, the tension being absolutely necessary to achieve a good print quality and on the other hand, with a magnifying glass to make the alignment between the micro stencil and the pads easy especially for fine pitch components.

THE SPIDER STENCIL™

Consists of a soft and semi-transparent material and is equipped with two fixing devices. The soft material gives the possibility to achieve a perfect sealing between the PCB and the micro-stencil even if the PCB is warped or not flat.
The semi-transparent material makes the alignment of the apertures with the pads very easy. The fixing devices allows a quick mounting of the spider stencil on the universal arm with enough stand-off to avoid any interference with the other components around the printing area, and are used to maintain the stencil tension for a good print quality.
Moreover, the spider stencils are provided with two overflowing limitations, one at the front and one at the back, to avoid any pollution of the PCB.
The design of the spider stencils gives an optimum accessibility to the pads with a dead zone around the pads which is smaller than 3 mm.

Spider Stencil - Selective Printing