Improvements of Productivity for PCB Drilling by Laser Driller Machine

This paper presents techniques that improve the productivity for printed circuit board (PCB) drilling by laser driller machine (LDM). The goal is to reduce the process time for a PCB workpiece. Applicable techniques include reducing the number of Galvo tiles, and path planning improvement for either tiles or holes. The non-crossing path approach proposed in this paper generates a shorter path for both platform positioning and drilled holes in tiles. This paper also suggests that a tile with more than 550 drilled holes should be separated into some segments to ameliorate the computation time of the whole path planning when using this non-crossing path algorithm. In our experiences, the moves and the settlings of the Galvo tiles dominate the efficiency of production. That is, reducing the number of Galvo tiles that cover all holes becomes paramount in productivity improvement. The typical workpieces with 11,760 and 28,026 holes are treated in a real process by LDM to evaluate the efficiencies of the proposed techniques. Results show that the reduction method for the number of tiles and the non-crossing path algorithm for both tiles and holes can increase productivity by approximately 16~17%.