EEVblog #684 - Ness SMT Maufacturing & Assembly Factory Tour

[EEVblog]

Damn, sorry Simon, I just edited your post instead of quoting and replying to it, wrong buton!
No way to recover that 
It's late, I need to sleep.

[coppice]

When I started my first production runs, I tried out China but the quality was awful.

I thought China was a country, not a manufacturer. You dealt with a lousy manufacturer. Why not refer to them, rather than paint 1/5 of the human race with a single brush. There are plenty of good companies in China, just as many in Germany and Japan are bloody awful.

[Fungus]

Does anyone else think this video is "nearly unwatchable" because of frame drops?

Not me.

[Simon]

Damn, sorry Simon, I just edited your post instead of quoting and replying to it, wrong buton!
No way to recover that 
It's late, I need to sleep.

No problem,

The lost bit was roughly as follows.

Low light will cause slow shutter speeds ad blurring the same as with still camera's.
I once tried to take a photo in our factory and the shutter set to 4s, so I went outside and the shutter set itself to 1/4000s so the outside light was 1000 times the internal light. Like out ears our eyes are not linear and we see little of the huge variation plus have the ability to adapt, a camera sensor is linear which is why the "stop" scale is not linear as it's our interpretation of a linear scale.

[coppice]

This video does look exceptionally jerky when you are moving around, even when you aren't moving very fast. Something wasn't working at its best that day. You have a couple of other videos this bad, while most are far better. I wonder if that relates to the hardware you used for these particular videos, or something about how it was used?

For the countless time now:
ALL videos cameras do this when you use auto mode in low lighting conditions. Yes indoor light like this is "low light". If I walked outside wiht the camera still recording the motion blur would disappear.
Even the 50fps original footage has motion blur, and if I shot it with a 120fps Gopro it would still have motion blur.
The only way to void it is to shoot a fixed very high shutter speed, and then you get crap grainy footage instead. Chose which one you hate least.

Have you updated the video on youtube in any way? When I watched it the first time there was no motion blur. There was severe and very unpleasant juddering. When I tried again just now, on the same PC, using all the same software, I see a fairly benign blur as you move around. This is very acceptable.

[Andlier]

Video is fine, no problem here.
One big difference I've seen in terms of quality between different CM's is how they handle the components outside the assembly line. From the video it seemed like they just kept some components at shelves next to the machines? What about humidity-control, baking if a component has been out of its bag for too long etc.? And how is that incorporated in the quality management system?

Would also love to know more about the decision to go with flying probes on un-powered boards vs. just needle-test-bed, or both? For boards with an MCU, if they have to program the board anyway later with a connector or test-bed, why not just do that and skip the flying-probe? After AOI, it can't be that many boards that fail on power-up. Surely a board with mcu/firmware in a needle-jig can do a pretty extensive functional test by itself, once it is running code. And how does the flying-probe machine get set up? Do they run a few golden boards through and set some ranges for resistive values between different nets?

[nixfu]

As a yank, I am very impressed with the Australian electronics industry.   Being right next door, it's almost like China has a harder time fooling you than they do us when they are half way round the world.   

[coppice]

As a yank, I am very impressed with the Australian electronics industry.   Being right next door, it's almost like China has a harder time fooling you than they do us when they are half way round the world.

As a yank you are probably nearer to China than Australia is.

[Fungus]

There was severe and very unpleasant juddering.

"severe and very unpleasant juddering" is probably a Youtube/network issue or a local playback issue (were you doing something CPU intensive when you watched it?)

[coppice]

There was severe and very unpleasant juddering.

"severe and very unpleasant juddering" is probably a Youtube/network issue or a local playback issue (were you doing something CPU intensive when you watched it?)

Nope.

[Howardlong]

When I started my first production runs, I tried out China but the quality was awful.

I thought China was a country, not a manufacturer. You dealt with a lousy manufacturer. Why not refer to them, rather than paint 1/5 of the human race with a single brush. There are plenty of good companies in China, just as many in Germany and Japan are bloody awful.

You will find that my experiences dealing with Chinese manufacturing are definitely not unique. It is a fundamental cultural thing. As I stated, you can make it work, but you will need to pay for someone to manage the relationship if you want any reasonable expectation of quality.

Similarly, offshoring development to India has a cultural cost as well, there is some similarity in that everything you ask for is met with a "yes" but their understanding of "yes" and mine are very different. In the end you end up employing expensive project managers to manage the offshore technical teams, soyou might as well have it done locally.

The outfit I mentioned that said they could do the 0402 boards and then decided they couldn't on the contracted delivery date four weeks later was in the UK, so yes, you are right, their are crap assemblers everywhere. That is why I firmly recommend a personally recommended assembler, and one that you go and see and press the flesh with.

I speak as I find, I wonder what your experiences been when offshoring work have been?

[rollatorwieltje]

In my experience it's always difficult to deal with external suppliers. Having them far away makes things even more difficult.
I find that suppliers rely heavily on the specifications you give them. If you don't specify it, they feel they can use that room to improve their own processes. Use that flash chip that's 0.1c cheaper, change the plastic compound a little, change the welding method a little...
I have yet to see any proper specification document for anything that isn't military stuff. And rightly so in my opinion, it takes forever to specify even the most simple product and in most cases it's wasted effort.
We had some boards that were randomly crashing, turns out the assembler has used a slightly different memory chip (the previous one was obsolete). Of course the specifications never mentioned the exact characteristics of that memory chip, nor the exact timings used by the processor, just the rough things like interface and size. Luckily it was fixable in software by changing the memory timing a bit. The specification document is now a version number higher and has an added chapter...

[coppice]

When I started my first production runs, I tried out China but the quality was awful.

I thought China was a country, not a manufacturer. You dealt with a lousy manufacturer. Why not refer to them, rather than paint 1/5 of the human race with a single brush. There are plenty of good companies in China, just as many in Germany and Japan are bloody awful.

You will find that my experiences dealing with Chinese manufacturing are definitely not unique. It is a fundamental cultural thing. As I stated, you can make it work, but you will need to pay for someone to manage the relationship if you want any reasonable expectation of quality.

How much time have you spent in China, working with the people there, to arrive at that conclusion. If you try engaging anyone too far away to keep a close check on what is happening, don't be too surprised by a bad conclusion.

Similarly, offshoring development to India has a cultural cost as well, there is some similarity in that everything you ask for is met with a "yes" but their understanding of "yes" and mine are very different. In the end you end up employing expensive project managers to manage the offshore technical teams, soyou might as well have it done locally.

If you outsource development to India you get what any reasonable person would expect. Do it on a big scale, employee people, and give them the expectation of a good career in the company, and you can get good results. Employee them without any expectation of anything long term and they'll take the money and offer the minimum in return. Off shore through a third party and you are in the world of "consultancies" which usually ends pretty, even if the work is being done down the road - ask almost anyone who has been involved in a SAP deployment. :-)

The outfit I mentioned that said they could do the 0402 boards and then decided they couldn't on the contracted delivery date four weeks later was in the UK, so yes, you are right, their are crap assemblers everywhere. That is why I firmly recommend a personally recommended assembler, and one that you go and see and press the flesh with.

Now you are starting to make sense. It doesn't need to be a local assembler, but does need to be someone you know through a trustworthy reference. Its better if you can get good oversight, too, which is often easier with a local assembler.

I speak as I find, I wonder what your experiences been when offshoring work have been?

What you have found is a few bad companies, and paint them all in the same way. A huge percentage of the world's electronics is assembled in China. Much of it is now designed there as well. It isn't all bad.

I spend a lot my time in China and India, working with a variety of people in different contexts. I have few really bad experiences on the engineering side. Managers can be rather tricky about financial issues quite often, but if you are in the UK you know all about people who won't pay on time. If I sat on the other side of the world, doing things remotely and often with language barriers, I think a lot of my experiences would be bad. You never need anything more than English to do things in India. In China a lot of the best people to deal with will only interact, verbally or in writing, in Chinese. This is true both for direct interaction, and for dealing through automated systems. For example, the PCB maker we use for most quick turn around prototypes don't have a single word of English on their web site, even though it supports the fully automated creation of board making orders, and the uploading of the necessary Gerbers and related files. They just aren't interested in the hassle of dealing with foreigners.

[G7PSK]

I watched the video this morning and found it fine and did not notice ant jerkiness or blurring so engrossed in the subject that I would not have noticed if Dave cut in pictures of nude women.
As for CEO's not knowing anything about the operational or rather the technical side of their business I know several like that, they have bought a ready going business coming from a different background, one ran a holiday hire boat fleet and sold that Thompsons holiday and purchased a food manufacturing machinery company another ran a chain of corner-shop newsagents sold that to a national chain and bought a general engineering fabrication company, neither of them knows any thing about what went on on the shop floor and one of them never even ventures onto the shop floor spends his entire life in the office. The businesses never the less are successful.
I was interested to hear about the RF problems of PIR sensors and alarm systems as I knew a radio ham that could not key up every time he was on an industrial estate where he worked due to setting off the alarm systems in the various factories.

[Codemonkey]

I've got a bit of experience working with subcontract manufacturers of varying sizes, both here in the UK, and in the far east (China and Taiwan).

Uk
I've worked with a few places in the uk, ranging from very small (one pick & place machine, mostly women sat with soldering irons placing components manually). Think small industrial estate unit, bit of a dump inside and quality very variable (in a previous job, they built stuff we didn't have capacity for in house). Through to a bigger much more professional company in my current job. We tend to use these for low volume stuff and quick turnaround prototype runs. They're very capable (most of our stuff is down at 0402 size), and quality is good. Their shop floor is smaller than that shown in the video from Dave, and they only have the one line but other than that pretty much the same sort of stuff. I don't think they have any automated test though.

China
We initially produced some of our products with a Taiwanese company who did the manufacturing in China. They had some impressive equipment (Fuji pick & place stuff, not sure about the rest). Workers were mostly low skilled, but they did have some on site R&D and their staff were very helpful. I visited them in Tianjin 4 times over a few years, mostly to commission our test solution and each time they were very welcoming. We had in place a good manufacturing contract which I think was key to ensuring there was no random swapping of components for cheaper alternatives, and our operations team were always on top of any QA issues. ESD precautions were in place and always adhered to when I was there, but I don't think they had an ESD floor.

Taiwan
We later moved to a Taiwanese manufacturer who do the manufacturing in Taiwan and their facility is in a different league to the one shown in the video. The facility is massive! I got a tour of the SMT line used to produce our product which was entirely located in a clean room with proper ESD floor. Bunny suits required for all workers, sticky pads on the floor to clean dust off your feet and an air shower on entry. From what I remember they had Hitachi equipment capable of 01005, auto optical inspection after component placement but before reflow (the boards have cans fitted so inspection required before placing the can and reflow soldering the whole thing). They had ovens to bake components before placement, encapsulation molding machines (more on this later), laser markers, 2D barcodes on everything for full tracking, and even a metal sputtering machine.
Once populated, the individual boards were de-panelized with a dicing saw, similar to those used for separating semiconductor die from a wafer.

They were able to make some quite advanced products such as tiny RF modules (bluetooth, GPS etc). I was shown an example of one module they produced the size of a QFN56 which for all extents & purposes looked like an IC once complete. In reality it consisted of a multilayer substrate (mega thin multilayer pcb) on which were placed and wirebonded multiple IC die (micro, flash & radio), a number of passives (about 12 in the example I was shown), and a crystal. They then used the package molding machine to encapsulate everything and the metal sputtering machine to coat the outside of the encapsulation in thin layers of copper & stainless steel I think. This served as the screening can. I think they said they could do RF stuff up to about 60GHz.

Working with them has been an absolute pleasure. All the staff I dealt with both remotely via email and in person (been there 3 times now to their facility near Taichung), have been superb and very competent. They really are experts at what they do and their capabilities world class. They were also incredibly courteous and ensured I was led out of the building quickly when an earthquake struck while I was sat working on our test system which was much appreciated! 

So, its easy to tar the far east with a bad reputation if your experience is with the tiny sweat shops, but there are companies out there that could definitely teach those in the west a thing or too.

[Richard Crowley]

I thought the video was excellent. Considering that it was essentially "live-to-tape" and unrehearsed, I was very impressed with Mr. Circosta's willingness to take Dave through the tour. There were a few spots where the video wasn't really aimed at anything in particular, either Mr. Circosta or the equipment, but then I would imagine that Dave was thinking more about his dialog than about aiming the camera. How many of us (even those of us who do video formally) wouldn't be temporarily distracted in such an exciting place and with such access to the C.E.O.? 

Yes, there were some "crude" jump-cuts, however given the nature and subject of the video, I found them not troubling in the least.  Great work Dave! 

[Simon]

@codemonkey

I think essentially you get what you pay for.

[Howardlong]

What I would say is that from the evidence so far, the good offshore experiences are from those who have had the benefit of a local physical presence in some form or other. This was exactly as I was saying, it can work, but you need local representation, and for smaller scale runs (say <10k units) the cost of paying for someone to do that for you (or doing it yourself) is going to be prohibitively expensive.

For my own situation, at the time I had had no formal introduction to contract manufacturing. But I learned a lot, the hard way.

My intention is to make others, who have a product they're looking to manufature, aware of the risks that I found when dealing with assemblers, particularly one with language and cultural differences. They might only cost $5 a board when the local guy is quoting you $15, but what is the cost of properly managing that business relationship? If you are lucky enough to be able to pay a visit to an assembler on the other side of the planet, then great, but for a run of say 1,000 boards, knowing what I know now it just wouldn't make financial sense.

Personally speaking, I have to say that after my experiences over a couple of months with the parts substitutions, the 50% yield, and the Chinese holidays, I was hours away from completely throwing in the towel and going back to the office job. I could not see myself spending the rest of my life hand placing boards! By complete fluke (another story) I found a local assembler who got me out of a hole and who I've been with ever since, and have assembled tens of thousands of my boards now.

[SgtRock]

Greetings EEVBees:

--Congratulations to DJ on what I consider his most interesting video yet. Dave is asking informed questions a mile a minute and Mr. Circosta is answering them knowledgeably on the jump. Just imagine what would have obtained if a Television Network had attempted this interview. And as an added bonus some long needed moderation has occurred.

--Not only does DJ present things clearly and cogently, he seems to be able to find interviewees that can do the same.

--Now that I am no longer in danger of being called some kind of "rent boy" for giving praise where it is due, just let me say kudos, I would like another, Sir.

"Horse sense is the thing a horse has which keeps it from betting on people."
William Claude Dukenfield, W. C. Fields 1880 - 1946

Best Regards
Clear Ether

[Neilm]

I watched that video thinking "Damm - I wish work would adopt some of that test philosophy"

[m100]

Interesting video.  Couldn't give a rats ass about the image quality during the pans, the content matters more than achieving the ultimate presentation.   

[CrashO]

Interesting video.  Couldn't give a rats ass about the image quality during the pans, the content matters more than achieving the ultimate presentation.   

I agree. Great content as this matters more than silkysmooth pans, it's an engineering vBlog, not the Victoria's secret fashion show... 

[Arp]

it's an engineering vBlog, not the Victoria's secret fashion show... 

[EEVblog]

Have you updated the video on youtube in any way? When I watched it the first time there was no motion blur. There was severe and very unpleasant juddering. When I tried again just now, on the same PC, using all the same software, I see a fairly benign blur as you move around. This is very acceptable.

Yes, I have uploaded the 50fps version of the video and now linked that in.
It's very interesting that perhaps there might be a difference here in the way youtube processed and/or delivers this video.
The only difference at my end is that the original 50fps was rendered in 25fps just the same as all my videos, and that originally uploaded 25fps version looks fine on my local PC.
It also looked fine to me on youtube too.
 

For those interested:
25fps:


50fps:

[abaxas]

AGHGHAHAHAHAHA

Dave spends his time giving us great quality content, all this bitching about panning,25/50hz and motion blur is irrelevant. Lets not waste his time, when he could better use it giving us even more quality content.

More please!