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The Chemical Connection: Thoughts on the Evolution of Automation

Serious discussions about automation in the PCB industry began in the mid-1970s. I profess no great expertise in automation, but I have been around the industry for a while now (I may have mentioned that on occasion), and I have seen many successful and unsuccessful attempts at automation over the years. As such, I have no hesitation in presenting my thoughts on automation. Feel free to agree or disagree.

A Bit of Japanese History
The first significant discussions on automation I was aware of occurred in the late 1970s and early 1980s. The Japanese were making inroads into U.S. printed circuit board sales with less expensive and higher quality boards than most U.S. PCB suppliers could provide. This was a time when, to make a profit, you had to churn out as many boards per day for the lowest cost possible, and the Japanese shops were beating us in both volume and price. Initially, the assumption was that the problem stemmed from Japan’s lower labor costs. This was true to some extent, but not by as much as we thought. If not with cheaper labor, how were they beating us?

To the best of my understanding (and I’m sure it was more complicated), the Japanese printed circuit industry leaders got together in the late ’60s, when PCB sales were taking off, and developed a roadmap of where the industry would be in five or 10 years and what the best way was to meet those demands. They foresaw that the demand for circuit boards would likely increase exponentially, with volume and price being the primary driving factors. They handled volume by anticipating needs and expanding production equipment as needed to keep up with demand. Reducing costs was not so simple. The biggest cost component is labor, and the surest way to reduce costs is to reduce the amount of labor. They decided to automate as much as possible to minimize the labor needed (note that I said minimize, not cut to the bone). They eliminated as much unskilled labor as possible while keeping a cadre of skilled, trained workers to monitor and maintain the equipment. By the late ’70s, they were significant players in the U.S. market.

How the U.S. Responded
Unfortunately, when faced with this competition, many American shops took the opposite tack. They reduced their skilled, trained (and highly paid) labor to the minimum needed to run the shop efficiently. They brought in more minimum-wage labor, relying on the remaining skilled labor to monitor and guide the unskilled labor. The skilled labor became overwhelmed trying to keep up, and efficiency dropped off at an alarming rate. When I questioned one manager about whether this was short-sighted in the long run, all I got was a terse, “I don’t care about the long run. All I care about is next quarter.”

This attitude is still prevalent, and not just in the printed circuit industry. Most shops that took this path are no longer with us, and most didn’t make it to the ’90s. Focusing all one’s planning on next quarter’s results at the expense of longer-term planning is a losing strategy in the long run (note the irony). Automation is not something to do on the spur of the moment. It requires insight into where you want your business to go, and that requires some planning.

So far, I have been using the term automation in a general sense, but as I was thinking about what to write about, I realized I had a rather narrow view of automation. For us, automation has always been conveyor loaders and unloaders, and robots to move materials around. The purpose is to reduce labor and increase efficiency; i.e., the people who formerly placed panels on and took them off the conveyor and stacked them at the end of the process could be more profitably used to monitor the process and equipment. One experienced operator could monitor several processes in place of four or five who did nothing but load and unload conveyors. This operator doesn’t need to be a college graduate, but should be someone knowledgeable about the process and paid enough to care about their job.

Big and Small Benefits
So, the advantages of some types of automation are obvious, but who benefits the most from automation? I assumed that most of the quotes we sent out that included automation were for big, high-volume shops, but the interest shown by medium and smaller shops that have smaller lot sizes and more varied product design surprised me. However, some have calculated that it may be more cost-efficient to let robots load and unload conveyors and use the personnel to do the tasks not suited to robots. Even for a smaller shop, it’s worthwhile to look into some form of automatic equipment to handle repetitive chores.

If we consider using automation as a labor-saving device, shouldn’t we also consider process controls as automation? I got mixed results when I put this question to our marketing and engineering departments. What brought it to mind was the failure of my free acid control for my cupric chloride etcher in my lab recently. It has been in use on this etcher for several years and has been so reliable that, other than monthly checking the calibration, we forget about it. After over 10 years of use, the transmitter failed, and I found we hadn’t used this type of transmitter for several years. There were no parts in stock, and it would take a few days to free up an electrician to install one of the new-style transmitters.

For the next three days, before operating the etcher, I had to titrate for the free acid, calculate how much acid to add, and measure out and add the acid. This took 20–30 minutes that could have been used more profitably in sample preparation. To my mind, this automatic process control is something even a smaller shop can consider.

These are my thoughts on automation in factories of all sizes, and uses of automation beyond what we might traditionally think about. You can agree or disagree, but there’s always something to talk about. 

This column originally appeared in the December 2025 issue of PCB007 Magazine.