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KIC has announced a global rebranding and introduced a new tagline to better represent its goals: "Making Ovens Smarter." For nearly 30 years, KIC has been leading the industry for automated thermal process tools and systems for reflow, wave, curing and semiconductor thermal processes.
Over the last decade, reflow oven manufacturers have done a great job of making their ovens more stable, reliable and less expensive. Looking forward, the majority of additional customer value will be created in the utilization of the ovens, and that is the area where KIC has and continues to develop new technologies. These new capabilities lead to reduced production cost, higher quality and new capabilities that the electronic assembly market is starting to demand. The smart technologies can be grouped into the following areas:
Process transparency: Automatically measure the PCB profile and its match to the relevant process window. Share this continuous and near real-time process and traceability data with all authorized personnel and MES over the factory’s LAN. True process data helps the maintenance people troubleshoot and fix issues faster.
Flexible + Fast: As electronic product variety keeps growing, the result is more frequent production line changeover. Productivity is lost when a multimillion dollar production line waits 15-30+ minutes on a $50,000 oven to stabilize on the new recipe. KIC’s technology provides either near instant oven changeover time or dramatically reduced downtime.
Automation: Humans have many wonderful talents, but consistency in repetitive tasks is not one of them. KIC’s automatic systems eliminate manual tasks such as periodic manual profiling and reduce the opportunities for human mistakes in setting up and running the ovens.
Reduced electricity consumption: KIC’s oven setup software has proven to reduce oven electricity use by up to 15 percent in numerous case studies.
One exciting aspect of these smart technologies is that they are retrofitable on virtually all oven models at nearly any age. Now the entire factory can use smart oven technologies. For more information, visit www.kicthermal.com.
