X-Out boards

of course it has an impact on line capacity.

x-out boards have a shorter cycle time, but you have to push more panels through the line to reach the order quantity

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Hi there,

As long as there is a standard procedure (choosing a so called bad-board-sensor [BBS], machines being taught in with this option, and operators trained) the impact should not be high.

True that you have to push more panels through. The thing to be careful here is not to create a bottleneck. Even with X-Out boards, your cycle time should not be less than any other machine (printer especially).

If your cycle time on pick and place is reduced under the printer's cycle time, you can clearly understand that the impact will be very high and your productivity will fall.

Regards, Tom

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The impact of course is a lot less for newer PnP, but for older machine there might be different story. What if the bad marks not being read correctly? The result would be "good" board being skipped, while "X-out" being loaded. That would waste much more time & material to fix those mistakes.

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Yes X-outs impact cycle times. Firstly, unless your board house is adding the bad marks you have the added labor of doing it yourself and programming your machines to look for them. Additionally, it adds time to each machine in the line (except for screen print) to go look for the bad marks. As others have pointed out here, older machines can be finnicky with bad board mark detection so you can have downtime screwing with that as well.

They are a pain but the reason everyone deals with them is because the price of boards is lower when you accept x-outs.

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If I have more than 1 X-out on a panel I set it aside for use as a setup piece or for training. If that's all we have and I need a couple more boards to meet an order I'll inspect the bare panel myself and go from there. We get a great price on boards so, not much of a loss. The board house always seems to always send more than the stated qty on the package too. If we have a 10 up panel and 2 are X'ed out, I must question the other 8. Not going to produce suspect boards and then they don't pass testing later. Stop it right now before the cost of processing it goes up further.

This message was posted the Electronics Forum @ SMTA

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As I see there is minimal capacity impact - because more panels on the line but nothing special. It is more question there are enough good fiducial for skipping-checking - at SiPlace it called as inkspot. It is important to have good operators who can check each machine found inskop and made fully spaced products. The overall placement time is same as complete PCBs because the placement process is shorter which counterbalances the addictional printing, inspection time.

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