Newbury Electronics has recently installed a laser direct imaging system that will deliver significant benefits to its clients, including improved accuracy, reduction in material costs and faster production times. The new machine, a UV-P300 LDI, is manufactured by Limata, and uses the latest in laser technology to produce far more technically demanding printed circuit boards than could be achieved using the more traditional photo lithographic techniques. It is the first machine of this type to be installed in the country.
Philip King, Managing Director at Newbury Electronics, said; "This is a significant investment for our company and one that we believe will make a real difference to both the quality of our products and the efficiency of our service. The old saying 'time is money' is very true in the highly competitive field of manufacturing and being able to deliver the highest quality PCB from here in the UK, with reduced delivery times, gives both us and our clients a real advantage in the market place."
The new machine, which has been installed at the company's manufacturing site in Newbury, uses an innovative eight laser sources that deliver a three-fold resolution improvement over more traditional photographic based systems. Images are printed directly on to circuit board material without the need to produce costly and fragile photographic master tooling. Problems associated with temperature and humidity instability of photography are eliminated. With a 25 micron laser spot, the high-resolution system installed at provides perfect images on the company's standard plating and resist masks.
Other benefits of the system are the provision of automatic fiducial camera registration which overcomes the problem of poorly registered images, the auto focus capabilities which allows the system to cope with different thickness of material and rapid job change-over without expensive tooling. The laser system is long life and fault tolerant. In the unlikely event of a laser failure, production continues with the remaining laser sources.
