| | | | | | What are the key feature to look for in buying a profiling product for Reflow ? | | | | | | | | Who's is the best and how much do these systems cost ? | | | | | | | | Thanks in advance. | | | | | | | | Hi Mark, | | | | | | I am currently the oven sector engineer for a large CM. | | | I spend a lot of time profiling and evaluating thermal profiling tools now days. There are two very solid makers of thermal profilers. One is KicThermal and the other is ECD. Either of these will cost you betwen 5 and 6 k. The most important feature of these profilers is that they are RF. You can view RTD while actually running production. We also have customers that require profiles be written while the oven is loaded. You can do that with any data logger but not real time. I prefer the KIC system (SlimkicII). The RF features act the same but you have 9 | | | t/c ports as opposed to 5 on the SUPERMOLE. I also prefer | | | the software KIC has developed. | | | | | | What is the advantage to having the profile data "real time" vs downloading the data after the profiler exits the oven. | | | | | | I Guess it the fact you can see if something is going wrong as it happens,eg: a T/C falls off. |
Okay, I'm letting my nerdiness show, but I think its really cool to watch the data in real time. You can cheer on those thermally dense spots with a "Spike baby, spike!"
But really now, I don't think there is much of a difference between real-time and downloaded data, excpet the downloaded is already synched up for you. I really like running profiles, (like a lot - I could be happy doing it all day) and seeing the reaction of the board to the thermal zones kind of gives me more of an inherent feel for how the components are reacting and makes those fine-tuning tweaks easier.
I've got KIC for reflow and Supermole for the wave - I definitely like the KIC software better.
Oh, and one more thing about real-time: the VP gets a huge kick out of showing it off to visitors - it makes us look high-tech.
:-)
Chrys
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