Sartorius Electronics invests in ASM equipment

Sartorius Electronics, based in Göttingen, Germany, functions as the internal supplier of electronic modules for the Sartorius Group. It has also been operating as an EMS provider for 25 years targeting the general market. In 2020, 129 initial sample jobs and 842 active jobs resulted in roughly 710,000 modules leaving the production lines. The rapidly rising in-house demand for electronic modules, component miniaturization and new applications made it necessary to modernise one of the two production lines. Sartorius selected equipment from ASM: “The core requirements of our internal and external customers are primarily speed for the initial sample process as well as great flexibility and high quality in the production of predominantly small and medium lot sizes. ASM was able to offer an overall solution that was optimized for the needs of Sartorius Electronics,” says Christoph Oeckl, who heads the ASM SMT Center of Competence in Munich in a press release. In the first six months after commissioning the new ASM line, Sartorius could improve its first pass yield to 99.36% and reduce the reject rate to as little as 0.53%. “We consider the introduction of the ASM line to [be] a success. We were able to raise our quality, process reproducibility and productivity while enjoying a level of support that is truly impressive in terms of type and scope,” says Thomas Eckart, manager of Sartorius Electronics. “The ASM ProcessExpert has been a significant advance not only in our initial sample development. The certifications as per the IPC-J-STD-001 and IPC-A-610 standards would have been impossible without the support from ASM’s experts,” adds Stefan Brandt, team lead and head of quality management at Sartorius Electronics. Since Sartorius will soon need more feeder slots on the new line due to further increases in component diversity and placement volume, it plans to install the SIPLACE SX+, a placement solution with no gantry and no head, but to which a gantry and head can be transferred from an existing machine in less than 30 minutes. It allows the user to instantly increase the number of feeder slots in the line by 33% without having to invest in more placement heads and more performance that may not be needed.