Excellon Success Story

Speedy Circuits, Huntington Beach, CA

“ We maintain our technical leadership in part by our association with Excellon Automation” Tom Stewart, Director of Engineering

Speedy Circuits is a leading manufacturer of technically demanding printed circuit boards, flex circuits, rigid-flex circuits, multi-chip modules (MCM-L), chip carriers, metal core boards and RF/microwave boards in fast turn prototype to medium volume production quantities.

Products include high layer count circuit boards, multi-chip modules, flexible and rigid-flex circuits.

Available features include: .003” lines and spaces, and 0.006” drilled holes, Laser drilled holes to .003” on Excellon Cobra and specialized materials such as polyimide, high Tg FR-4, BT, Cyanate Ester, PTFE, Lead free ROHS compliant and metal heat sinks and backings.

An important factor in maintaining such technical leadership is the engineering capability within the company. Speedy provides a full range of “front end” technical services, where they can often catch design or manufacturability issues before they become expensive false-starts. These services include: engineering reviews of manufacturability; electronic Design Rule Check; CAM editing; and panelization.

When the need for position budget of 5 mils or less it is nearly impossible to manage without having equipment to look at the panel and determine inner layer registration movement.

Speedy chose their long time equipment partner Excellon Automation to provide the solution. Excellon installed a Concept 129 Intelli-Drill® with the ability to examine inner layer movement and provide layer correction data. With this ability some of the most challenging jobs are enjoying reasonable yields. They also added XACT PCB registration software available from Excellon to build a database of how the many different types of materials react in their fabrication processes. This will allow for even more accurate prediction of scaling factors through the statistical observation of the material characteristics.

With this new equipment, yields of their complex panels increased by as much as 30%. In addition they are able to accept jobs that previously were too complex to manufacture with any confidence. High temperature lead free materials behave quite different than some of their standard counterparts. The CAM front end is making better decisions by using this data.

In one week, 3 jobs would have been 100% scrap if not for the Concept 129 Intelli-Drill®. Instead they shipped complete and on time. One had a total annular ring of 4 mils and had do hold 1 mil minimum annular ring.

Speedy Circuits has been a partner of Excellon Automation for many years. They have influenced the product definitions as well as provided valuable testing.