Advantech Industrial IoT Blog

A global leader in screw manufacturing partnered with Advantech to create a predictive maintenance system for screw forming machines. With production capacity of 6.6 billion nuts per year, the company depends highly on automated manufacturing equipment. As such, the risk of considerable losses in the event of equipment failure is high. Previously, experienced technicians had to literally listen to the equipment and identify the source of a problem when a machine would make unusual noises. 

Volatile organic compounds (VOCs) comprise a broad range of carbon-based chemicals, some of which are dangerous to human health and the environment. As a result, the growing interest in indoor air quality in the workplace is stimulating the development of measuring instruments for detecting VOC emissions in enclosed atmospheres, such as laboratories, semiconductor clean rooms and production line environments. 

Rather than using temperature sensors to monitor temperature, distributed temperature sensor (DTS) monitoring systems use optical fibers as temperature sensing devices. With temperature sensing optical fiber cables installed in the monitored area and connected to a host computer, measurement software can be used to display real-time temperature changes. Benefiting from the advantages of optical fibers, which include being unaffected by electromagnetic interference, freely bendable, small and easy to install, and able to support detection in large areas without blind spots, DTS systems are especially suitable for high-risk, disaster prevention applications, such as power cables, oil, gas pipelines and storage tanks, and highway/railway tunnels

In the field of machine automation, the PCI bus has long been the first choice for card expansion interfaces but by comparison, a PCI Express has higher performance and a simpler I/O configuration while offering accurate real-time transmission and a layered structure. Advantech offers impeccable solutions in machine vision, motion control and data acquisition to meet the needs and improve the overall efficiency of various industries. 

As electronic products required larger numbers and more intricate arrangement of electronic components on printed circuit boards (PCBs), the PCB development trend of high density wiring has brought about innovations and advances in drilling technology. Of these innovations, the non-contact laser process, requiring no blades, has become an important process instrument for high density PCB manufacturing. Besides precluding problems such as blade blunting and chipping, its pros include better performance on hole diameter accuracy, process speed and quality consistency. 

As technology progresses from research laboratories into practical implementations and as advancements are made in the underlying hardware and software, there has been an exponential increase in machine vision capabilities and applications. The manufacturing marketplace continues to apply machine vision systems in innovative ways to improve performance and quality. This is largely due to high-performance devices being economically applied to solve a variety of problems. Another major contributing factor is ease of use, as new solutions are becoming increasingly simpler to deploy and support compared to their older hardware and software counterparts. To meet the various requests that are emerging with this trend, Advantech offers three major solutions for different fields: configurable solutions, all-in-one solutions and machine learning solutions. 

Ceramic covers have been developed as a new and innovative material for mobile phones. Their production requires complete automation in order to prevent defects during such processes as loading/unloading, polishing and laminating. Concurrent automated visual machine inspection is also necessary to maximize yield. Demand and production standards are exceptionally high for this market, and thus fully automated around-the-clock production is essential to ensure both production quantity and quality. 

The semiconductor industry has some of the most demanding applications, a combination of extreme accuracy and precision combined with high throughput. The semiconductor processing can be divided into two parts - "frontend" and "backend".

The term Backend refers to dicing the wafer into individual chips and all the processors thereafter; such as test, assembly and packaging. 

To deal with faster and more powerful chip technology, semiconductor process linewidth technology has continued to evolve down to the nano-level, and the backend of semiconductor processes also needs to provide a shorter production cycle, in order to increase production throughput per unit of time.

In manual electronics manufacturing processes that require the application of adhesives, it generally takes double the effort to complete in comparison to when automated dispensers are used. When traditional adhesive dispensers are used, the process involves using contact-type dispensers to apply adhesives to such surfaces as electronic components and LED packaging.