Offshore Electronics Ltd - Competitive Component Procurement

Three fast and flexible Philips surface mount lines for 0402 - BGA placement. Each automated line consists of a DEK screen printing machine, Philips SMD chip shooter, Philips fine pitch placement machine and forced air reflow soldering equipment.

Controlled processes are the key to achieving a high quality finished product from our three surface mount production lines.All three high specification DEK265 screen printers provide a fully automated, repeatable perfect solder paste print on the PCB to be assembled and with an enclosed air conditioned environment the solder paste retains its optimum consistency.

Once printed the board is transported by conveyer into a GEM Topaz high speed chip shooter. Using 8 heads the Topaz is capable of placing 15,000 components per hour down to a size of 0402. The board then passes to a GEM Emerald which places the high precision parts such as BGAs, QFPs, TSOPs etc.

The process is completed when the board is passed through a forced air reflow oven that reflows the solder paste and forms a perfect soldered joint.

Through hole soldering is undertaken on one of two Blundel CMS400 flow solder machines. One is dedicated to lead free (SnAgCu) soldering, the other is dedicated to tin lead (SnPb) soldering. For complex mixed technology double sided assemblies, Pillarhouse selective soldering equipment has recently been installed.

With a purpose built 20,000sq ft factory, the main production area is impressive. The clean and tidy environment is populated with modern anti-static benching and full anti-static flooring to create a static safe working environment to manufacture your products.

We employ 65 experienced and dedicated staff and all of our manufacturing staff are qualified to the relevant IPC-A-610 workmanship standard.

Whether you are looking for PCB board build or a complete turnkey instrument build we have the resource and experience to meet your requirements.

We offer a comprehensive test facility with two Teradyne Z1890 ATE in circuit test machines, AOI automated optical inspection, J-Tag boundary scan, full functional board and instrument test together with calibration, QC and soak tailored to meet any specific requirement

At the heart of our test facility are two Teradyne Z1890VP in-circuit test machines. With a maximum node count of 2048,
comprehensive analogue and digital device coverage and vectorless test techniques, we can obtain a very high level of fault coverage with a short test time.

We pride ourselves on offering low cost test tooling using our fixturing partners, FABMaster translation software and experienced programmers.

We also offer J-Tag test and a variety of functional test solutions using modern test equipment and highly trained, experienced test engineers.

Whatever your requirement we can develop a test solution to meet your needs.

A flexible, responsive service with your product quality assured by our stringent BS EN ISO9001:2000, BABT and IPC-610 quality accreditations.

Offshore Electronics Ltd has a fully integrated Quality Management System that is certified to BS EN ISO9001:2000 by Lloyds Register of Quality Assurance. The Company also holds BABT Approval for the production of telecommunicating product.
The QMS implemented by Offshore ensures that customer requirements are addressed at all levels providing high levels of confidence in the functionality and reliability of manufactured equipment.

During manufacturing, workmanship standards comply with the requirements of IPC-A-610 class 3 and provide the consistently high build standards that are required by UK, European and International OEMs and end-users.

The company is currently working towards BS EN ISO140001 environmental accreditation.

RoHS Compliance and Leadfree Manufacturing.

We have been lead free capable since 2005 and have both lead free and tin lead manufacturing processes running in parallel throughout the facility. Where customer products are either exempt or have not been designed to the RoHS guidelines we are able to offer considerable support and help.

The current situation.

The ROHS directive required that from July 2006 electrical products do not contain Lead, Mercury, Cadmium, Hexavalent Chromium and Polybromide based materials.

We have installed all the items of capital equipment required, have formal processes and completed extensive IPC training with respect to lead free production. We currently produce 4,000 plus RoHS compliant assemblies per month but still have many exempt, legacy and non compliant products in production that will ultimately need to comply or be updated.

Component Manufacturers are still migrating to SnAgCu terminations and PCBs from HASL to a Tin HASL, silver or gold plated finish. This has been the most difficult part of the project and considerable investment and effort has been made to collate and integrate the manufacturer’s component compliance data into our manufacturing system. We are currently able to advise customers of the compliant/non compliant state of individual BOMs and will support the conversion to RoHS compliance when requested.

We rely on the manufacturer’s declaration of RoHS compliance for the conformity of individual components and sub assemblies. These statements are taken in good faith and form the basis of our declaration of RoHS compliance for populated assemblies.