MYDATA celebrates 20 years anniversary

MYDATA was founded by a team of born inventors. They were driven by the conviction that SMT producers would benefit from a different type of placement machine. In the early 1980s, these manufacturers were looking for flexible surface mount solutions that would help them program quickly, with a high level of accuracy. Though, the MYDATA story really started 10 years earlier, back in 1973. It was then in a red turn-of-the-century house in the outskirts of Stockholm, Sweden. Lennart Stridsberg and Gunnar Rodin, two young inventors, created and built a computer that could measure microvolt signals at 250 different points. They also invented a machine that assisted the assembler to manually place components correctly on circuit boards; a light beam projected a symbol at the correct place on the board, and all the assembler had to do was insert the right component, into the right position. This reduced error rates by 97 percent. They called the invention the Logpoint. In 1984, the company moved to the city. Though the Logpoint sales were up, more money was needed to continue the research and development around its latest invention - a completely automated surface mount placement machine.The team plunged ahead. After months of intensive research and late-night brainstorming, they refined their theories regarding split-axis design. The first MYDATA TP9 placment machine was born. Today, MYDATA is a successful international enterprise, yet it is the stable "split-axis approach" that still forms the heart of every machine. Since then, eight other MYDATA machine models have been introduced on the market; more than 2000 machines have been sold and are in use worldwide by companies like Celestica, Ericsson, Flextronics, Hewlett Packard, Hitachi, SCI and Thomson.