Oct 22, 2009 
For more than 15 years, Hawk Electronics has been involved with Liverpool University, building highly complex circuit boards and cables for the Hadron Collider project in Cern, Geneva. The inspection side of the business was becoming a challenge, and Hawk Electronics realized the need for a fully automated inspection station. After investigating the market and attending numerous demonstrations of automated inspection systems available in the UK and Europe, the company chose Blakell Europlacer Ltd.’s SAKI BF-Voyager AOI system.
“Blakell Europlacer’s SAKI BF-Voyager AOI system stood out from the rest of the providers of AOI solutions, not only for the easy-to-use technology, but also the low maintenance and running costs made it a very affordable and attractive proposition for the company,” said Alicja Kay, Managing Director for Hawk Electronics Ltd. “Bringing the SAKI BF-Voyager into our production cycle makes a huge difference, not only for Hawk but also for our customers, with both parties benefiting from efficiency and cost savings. This investment has contributed greatly to Hawk Electronics winning a prestigious technology award sponsored by BAE Systems for the Geneva Project.”
The SAKI BF-Voyager AOI system features very fast cycle times, typically less than 18 seconds per panel, and can keep up with the rest of Hawk Electronics’ manufacturing process. Most importantly, it has created opportunities for other highly demanding and complex types of work to be produced safely at Hawk Electronics, now that the company has state-of-the-art AOI capabilities.
Blakell Europlacer is one of the pre-eminent equipment suppliers in the UK and currently distributes Europlacer placement, Speedprint stencil printing, Evest placement, SAKI AOI, Hexi reflow oven equipment, R&D vapour phase BGA rework, Aegis fully integrated data preparation software and Datapaq thermal profiling. The company has made the strategic move into distribution in order to increase its penetration of the UK market for its new partners, as well as for its own products, Europlacer and Speedprint.
For more information about Hawk Electronics Ltd., visit http://www.hawkelectronics.co.uk. For more information about Blakell Europlacer Ltd., visit http://www.europlacer.co.uk.
