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Andrew Kelley is CTO of Xact PCB, a company founded by engineers with firsthand experience in PCB fabricators. Xact PCB has developed a cutting-edge system to monitor and predict the registration of inner layers through advanced registration control systems. By leveraging data collected from various production stages, Xact PCB’s GX tool enhances precision. It minimizes errors, ensuring that the final products meet their customers' exact specifications while eliminating the need for costly pilot lots.
Marcy LaRont: Andrew, tell me about Xact PCB.
Andrew Kelley: We provide registration control systems for PCB manufacturers, but we all started in PCB manufacturing. Our engineers were making printed circuit boards, living with the manufacturing problems day in and day out. Our software product was a solution we spun into a commercial product many years ago. Since then, we've been installing it worldwide. The system monitors the registration of the inner layers at various points in the process. It learns from the information it picks up and combines that with information about the materials and processes used, enabling it to make predictions for future designs. It will predict how the different layers will move during processing to give you counter artwork scales, so the final product is exactly the nominal size required for the end customer.
LaRont: It is advantageous to your product development that your core group came out of physically making the boards. Explain Xact PCB’s approach to improving inner layer registration through these smart tools.
Kelley: The core point for any measurement system has been an X-ray drill process system post-lamination, which unfortunately means any errors on the board are already fixed in the board. You can't change them, but you can learn from them. However, as long as the layers line up, you can counter any subtle scale errors by then adjusting the drilling process, the next imaging process, and so on. The X-ray drill is probably the core point from which all our systems users would begin.
To read the entire interview, which originally appeared in the December 2024 issue of PCB007 Magazine, click here.
