TECHNOLOGY
Apart from picking a location which is easy on the eyes the promoters of the company were also keen on ensuring that the company was based on the latest technology. To this end they scoured the U.S and European markets for both technology and machinery.
At that time the electroless copper plating method was the rage. Later on of course other methods like D.P.S. and shadow system came into vogue. But basically all these methods exploit the characteristic of palladium which enables this metal to creep over non metalled surfaces and its affinity for copper.
Thus the company went in for two plating lines – one for high build electroless copper and the other for Electroplating. Over the years other plating systems like DPS have also been tried but finally the company has reverted back to the high build electroless copper which has been found to be the most suitable system.
The Company made special efforts looking for the latest in Plating System it stands to reason that the raw material being fed to the Plating System has to be of high quality. In other words the drilled boards should not suffer from defects like hole roughness , nail heading etc. This being the case , the company after a lot of investigation decided to go in for Pluritec CNC machines which at that date were among the best in the world.
Since the company basically manufactures double sided and multilayered boards and since the trend in these boards was towards ever narrower tracks and distances between tracks the company decided to embrace fine line technology . Thus the electroless copper plated boards are laminated with U.V. Sensitive film on which the pattern in printed by means of Diazo films and U.V. Exposure machines. Developing and rinsing exposes the copper tracks for subsequent electroplating.
After stripping away the unwanted copper the PCB's are masked with U.V.sensitive Photo Imageable Solder Mask.This yields a hard mask surface which is resistant to scratches and also ensures no solder bridges are formed during component mounting and subsequent wave soldering in assembly line.
The boards are subsequently subjected to the Hot Air Levelling Process which ensures uniform deposition of solder on the tracks. It also yields the desired solder contour which is not possible with solder dipping.
As routing can prove critical on some jobs the company went in for state-of-the-art pluritec routing machine.
As continuity of the PCB's is vital to the functioning of the PCB's the company invested a huge amount in a Bare Board Tester from Circuit Line which represented the state-of –the-art at that date.
For multilayer production the company invested in a PHI press one of the most sophisticated in the market. The accurate temperature, pressure and vacuum controls ensure that the end product is fault free.
This general bent of heavy investment in technology does not end with the production machinery. At a time when pollution prevention and environment control had not yet become shibboleths for either industry or government the company was thoughtful enough to invest in an Effluent Treatment Plant. Thus contamination by acids, residues of copper, tin and lead are totally detoxified before the water is released into the ambience.