Plantin S.A

Plantin S.A, located in France, is a manufacturer of medium series multi-layer rigid printed circuit boards. They are a subsidiary of CIRE Group (www.cire.fr), the tenth largest printed circuit board (PCB) fabricator in Europe and in the top 85 globally. Plantin produces 2,000 square meters of PCB material per month with a standard three-week turn-around. Like many low to medium volume PCB fabricators, Plantin is focused on reducing costs and increasing turn-around times in order to remain competitive in their industry.

PCB legend marking (a.k.a. nomenclatures) at Plantin was accomplished with traditional silk-screen technology using white ink. This process has long set-up times and high set-up costs. It takes up to a half a day and over eight process steps just to produce a silk-screen. There are also numerous consumables involved in developing images on screens, printing images from screens, and then breaking-down screens for next lot set-up. Plantin identified an opportunity to reduce costs and increase turn-around times by converting this legend printing process to a digital technology.

First EIE (www.firsteie.com), located in Geneva, introduced Plantin to their CP-400 Legend Printing System. The First EIE system integrates the MARKEM Model 4000 Drop on Demand ink jet printer and uses the MARKEM 4600 Series white-colored UV curable jetting ink. As one of the PCB industry's top five global suppliers of photoplotters, First EIE was already a preferred supplier to the CIRE Group with an excellent rating in product quality, reliability and support. Their precision motion controls and proven imaging technology combined with the MARKEM experience in Drop on Demand ink jet printing and white-pigmented ink technology provided Plantin the confidence in making the transition to this new digital printing technology.

The Model 4000 integrated printing system was installed at Plantin in November 2002. It has replaced the two manual silk-screen printers at Plantin. It is utilizing their existing UV curing system and meeting performance requirements on their existing Probimer 77 solder mask coating. The system is being fully utilized from February 2003 in their production printing a minimum of 5,000 boards per month. The cost savings and turn-around time reductions at Plantin were immediate. Their new CP-400 Legend Printing System was calculated to have a less than one year payback period.