New clip from my factory tour of a PCB assembly shop in China this past week - showing a pick and place (PNP) machine.
The toolhead on this machine has multiple vacuum nozzles which pick up the tiny components, move them to the correct spot on the PCB, then place and release them
May 8, 2025 20:29They are super quick - after they are set up for a specific PCB job. The factory manager told me that the machine setup (loading components, programming, doing a small test batch) takes the majority of the time for production, as these are very slow and manual steps.
It's also one of the reasons why you get economies of scale - regardless if you produce 10 PCBs or 10,000 PCBs, you will have to do the machine setup (at least) once. That fixed overhead gets split across more boards when you have higher order volumes
