Intelligent Manufacturing € February € 1996 € Vol. 2 € No. 2
Intelligent Manufacturing € February € 1996 € Vol. 2
€ No. 2
When electronics giant Motorola Corp. (Schaumburg, Ill.) evaluates
a new software platform, it focuses on how quickly the software can
be moved into production and redeployed on new lines and new
products. The bottom line in software deployment at Motorola is
productivity: How much faster can the company get the production line
up and producing quality product?
Motorola's Wireless Data Group is achieving its productivity goals
using G2, an object-oriented real-time intelligent system from Gensym
Corp. (Cambridge, Mass.), to develop custom manufacturing
applications for its printed circuit board (PCB) assembly operation.
According to Chuck Coughlin, Motorola senior systems engineer, the
company built a prototype cell control system in about the same time
as it would have taken to install a prepackaged system. The
object-oriented design allowed Motorola to rapidly clone equipment
servers for similar machines, which in the first attempt took only
two hours. Motorola now has more than custom capabilities -- it has a
powerful tool set for future applications.
Motorola's functional requirements for the new system include
operator displays for line status and defect entry, recipe
management, and test data collection, as well as interfaces to a
variety of testers, insertion machines, and an Oracle relational
database for keeping historical records. The system is currently
being used for defect collection and charting statistical process
control (SPC).
Motorola's displays show a live schematic of the assembly line as
well as an operator's control panel for each machine that indicates
last measurement values, machine utilization, fault counts, and an
SPC chart. If operators want more information, they can easily access
interactive screens that show charts for any selected data points.
Furthermore, the intelligence in the system gives Motorola the power
to build in still more powerful capabilities. "The system has the
intelligence to recognize the cause of an SPC rule violation and can
identify what caused the part to be out of tolerance," Coughlin
explained.
In addition to its ability to support interactive charting, the
system is also able to self-configure itself as new PCBs are created
or new data parameters occur. "The system can react to data it hasn't
'seen' before and will know what to do with it," he continued. "For
example, new parameters appear on the screen automatically with all
the relevant test points. This speeds up the development process and
limits maintenance cost."
Motorola Wireless's system also has the intelligence to generate
operator displays of PCBs directly from CAD data. The system
self-generates board displays with intelligent objects using CAD
placement data, in real-time and on the fly. Icons of component parts
are positioned using data from an Oracle database. According to
Coughlin, the ability to use real-time CAD data "ensures accuracy,
currency and time savings."