Mutracx: First Install Achieves CAM to Etch in 5 Minutes

Estimated reading time: 2 minutes

While visiting Whelen Engineering, which had just installed Mutracx's new Lunaris machine, I met with Mutracx Sales and Marketing Director Peter Coakley, who showed me how the new machine works and explained how it can save time and money on the shop floor.

Barry Matties: Why don’t you just start by explaining the Lunaris imaging process?

Peter Coakley: What you are looking at here is our digital inkjet printer, a key component of the automated process. At Whelen, it is used for etch resist (inner layers), and plating resist applications (outer layers). This process replaces many costly steps in the traditional photolithography and provides significant reductions in process time, massive cost savings in materials and labour, and is fully compatible with supporting “green” manufacturing ethics and the environmental requirements demanded here at Whelen.

In a production environment, we go from a file that the CAM operator prepares to inkjet printing and subsequent etch or plating process in five minutes. That’s what we offer, the flexibility and full batch automation that lets you actually print, on the panel, the exact circuit design you need in a short time.

With the conventional process, you would have to laminate the panel with dry film, manufacture a set of artworks and then expose that dry film using these artworks on a separate process followed by a developer process to wash off the majority of that unexposed dry film.

Matties: And it’s done inline as well?

Coakley: It’s automation that lends itself to inline volume production. Due to the flexible CAM interfacing without set up time it’s perfect to manufacture in a high-mix environment, even running prototypes between the main production volume.

Using the automated line buffers, you can stop a job part way through and switch production types and lots, so it has the flexibility built in to switch jobs and print either a negative image for subsequent plating or an inner layer positive image prior to etching.

Let me just emphasise again, that the inkjet process does not require a developing process as you only use the minimum of ink resist needed to produce the circuit design, thereby again reducing processing time, materials and wastage.

Matties: How does it know which job? Does an operator have to come in and select?

Coakley: In the basic manual operation mode that is possible, but the system is designed for full automation by referencing panels in barcoded trays at the very start of the manufacturing process. It uses the master database to print the right image design on the right panel with minimum intervention.

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Editor's Note: This article originally appeared in the October 2015 issue of The PCB Magazine.