Embedded PCB boards in electronic products play a crucial role of communication platform in the electronics industry in Taiwan, connecting upstream and downstream suppliers, and creating increasing export revenues. PCB boards are the competitive strength of Taiwan, and boost Taiwan’s domestic economic development by continuously bringing foreign exchange to Taiwan. However, competition from China, Japan and Korea has slowed down Taiwan’s PCB industrial growth; therefore, the promotion of a PCB smart production model is an urgent issue in order to boost the competiveness of the electronics industry in Taiwan.
Traditional PCB production lines lack a sensing, connective and smart analysis mechanism, as well as failing to respond to issues such as insufficient human resources, fierce competition and smart production demands of customers. In light of the high level of smart production demands of Taiwan’s PCB industry, the MOEA provides full support to push the supply chain of the PCB industry to transform from “automation” to “smart production” in order to reach Taiwan’s goals of PCB production, material, and equipment output per capita, as well as to maintain PCB industry’s top status in the world.
In the past, AOI testing of PCB was both time- and labor-consuming as it required manual reading to control quality. It was difficult to modify production processes via real-time defect feedbacks and increase production efficiency. Questions from customers were not quickly responded to. In order to develop effective solutions, one of Taiwan’s PCB leaders, Unimicro, conducted small-scale testing for its own IC carrier production line. Its empirical results show that through the integration of heterogeneous networks, data of each testing machine can be quickly collected and the time to extract data from the information platform can also be shortened. With the automatic optic inspection of ancillary equipment of the Industrial Technology Research Institute, false ratio caused by minor discrepancies between an AOI machine and IC carrier can be dramatically reduced. More importantly, the “analyses and recognition of defect causes” system substantially speeds up the identification of problems.
The testing of IC carriers conducted at Unimicro is just a small step towards intelligent PCB industry. In order to apply the smart production model to other products such as FPC, car PCB and rigid-flex PCB, the standard for heterogeneous networks promoted by the Taiwan Printed Circuit Association and the Institute for Information Industry has now been implemented. For the future, along with the comprehensive development of smart sensing and IoT platform technologies, and the integration of a heterogeneous network standard, Taiwan’s PCB manufacturers will soon enter the era of smart production. The productivity of PCB makers will be enhanced, and PCB production equipment and material providers will be assisted to enhance their competiveness in the era of smart production. Revenue from upstream and downstream PCB industrial chain will also be increased to reach our goal of one trillion New Taiwan Dollars by 2020.