Philips gets SMT just‐in‐time

Abstract

High volume telecommunications equipment is expected to be one of the biggest users of surface mount technology over the next decade in Europe, so it was no surprise to find Philips Radio Communication Systems Ltd (PRCS), Cambridge, England headquarters is one of the largest SMT facilities. The size advantages offered by SMT are probably most clearly demonstrated by one of the products Philips makes here: pocket radio pagers. Together with modern custom analogue integrated circuits, SMT has enabled a pager to take up little more than the volume of a cigarette lighter. Just a few years ago, a fully transistorised version would have been the size of a hip flask and needed a substantially larger pocket. Nevertheless, the production of pocket pagers is not a simple application of such technology since the products themselves have special features. To begin with, they are necessarily customised according to the segment of the frequency band they work in, and consequently must be calibrated and tested as they are assembled. Philips has also adopted a full just‐in‐time philosophy for component and board make‐up (the first fully integrated one this writer has seen), and according to them some 28 different PCB‐sized products can be accommodated in the system from week to week.

Citation

McClelland, S. (1987), "Philips gets SMT just‐in‐time", Assembly Automation, Vol. 7 No. 1, pp. 32-34. https://doi.org/10.1108/eb004206