Innovative Circuits beefs up its machine park with Schmid

With the acquisition of the new production equipment the American bare-board PCB supplier is strengthening its technological advance and secures a long-term planning security. Both systems will be manufactured in Schmid's optimised InfinityLine design, which is the combination and optimisation of previous Schmid CombiLine and PremiumLine. The InfinityLine adopts the small passage slots from CombiLine or the spray manifold connection from PremiumLine and combined the advantages of both modular systems. The Schmid alkaline etching line permits a much higher accuracy over the etched surface and therefore an optimised geometry of the etching foot. The Fineline spray system and the intermittent etching with single nozzle control enable an etching process with qualities that were considered hard to achieve until recently. “The new SCHMID equipment enables uniform etching pattern and line/space structures in circuit boards with an etching factor capability superior to previous offerings. We now are able to reliably achieve our target of producing line/space parameters with ½ oz copper thickness of sub 3-mil lines and spaces”, says Dale Lovell, Chief Engineer at Innovative Circuits, in a press release from Schmid. “We have made technological improvements with regard to chemical carryover, filtration and dosing accuracy. The machine availability has been further increased and the very compact and user-friendly design makes our equipments easily accessible for maintenance,” says Fred Johnson, Director Sales North America, Business Unit Electronics at Schmid. Above all, the reproducibility of the etching which results from the recipes stored in the system gives Innovative Circuits a distinctive competitive advantage.