A pick-and-place machine uses vacuum nozzles on a moving head to take parts from feeders, check them with cameras and place them at the coordinates and rotations in its program, which is built from the centroid file. High-speed chip shooters place tens of thousands of small passives an hour, while flexible placers handle large ICs, connectors and odd shapes. On small batches, feeder setup and program checking eat most of the time.
Pick-and-place had the wrong reel on feeder 22, the first ten boards got 1k where it should be 10k.
Also heard as
- P&P
- PnP
- placement machine
- chip mounter
Related terms
Centroid file
File listing the X-Y position, rotation and side of every surface mount part for the pick-and-place machine.
Fiducial
Small bare copper target on a board or panel that machine vision uses to locate it precisely.
BOM
Bill of materials: list of every part on an assembly with designators, values and part numbers.
SMT
Surface mount technology: soldering components onto pads on the board surface instead of through holes.