Most buyers never walk the floor of the factory building their boards. An equipment list is the next best thing. It shows where a panel actually travels, how many machines back each process, and which steps run on dedicated equipment instead of shared lines. The walkthrough below follows a production panel from cut laminate to packed shipment, stage by stage.
One distinction helps when reading it. This list covers hardware; the numbers it holds to (layer counts, minimum trace, impedance windows) are published separately on our capability sheet. The two documents answer different questions: what the plant runs, and what it holds.
The floor at a glance
| Stage | Representative equipment |
|---|---|
| Imaging and AOI | Camtek Dragon / Sirius AOI on inner and outer layers |
| Lamination | High-Tg brown-oxide line, 260-tonne vacuum presses |
| Drilling | 12 six-spindle Hitachi CNC machines plus 15 other CNC drills |
| Plating | Through-hole, full-panel, and pattern lines; in-house immersion gold |
| Solder mask | 12 screen printers, parallel-light exposure |
| Routing | 10 Schmoll CNC routers, 2 V-cut saws, punch presses |
| Electrical test | 5 flying-probe, 2 universal grid, 17 dedicated fixture testers |
| Lab | Polar Cits500s with Tektronix DSA8200 (TDR), Oxford CMI XRF, Leica metallography |
Imaging and inner layers
Inner-layer work starts with tooling from an automatic plotter, then dry-film lamination and parallel-light exposure form the conductive pattern. Before any panel goes to press, it passes automatic optical inspection on Camtek machines (Dragon and Sirius series). Timing is the point here: once inner layers are laminated, a defect is locked inside the board, so catching opens, nicked traces, or spacing violations at this stage costs far less than finding them in final test.
Lamination and registration
Multilayer bonding runs through a horizontal brown-oxide line rated for high-Tg materials, then into vacuum presses (260-tonne class) with rivet-assisted layup to hold layer alignment under heat and pressure. After lamination, X-ray machines locate the inner-layer targets and set the drill program, so outer-layer holes land on inner pads instead of drifting.
Drilling
Twenty-seven CNC drillers cover the floor. Twelve are six-spindle Hitachi machines that carry volume lots; the remaining fifteen run in two-, four-, and six-spindle configurations for prototypes and smaller orders. Splitting the fleet this way keeps a 20-piece prototype job from queuing behind a 5,000-panel production run. First articles get an X-ray check of hole-to-pad registration before the lot releases.
Plating and surface finishes
Plating runs on three dedicated lines: through-hole plating for hole-wall copper, full-panel plating, and pattern plating for fine-line build-up. Surface finishes are applied in-house as well. The immersion gold line in particular stays on our floor, so finish thickness never depends on an outside shop’s schedule.
Solder mask and routing
Twelve screen printers apply solder mask, with parallel-light exposure holding registration on fine-pitch dams and legend. Depaneling splits by job type: ten CNC routers (Schmoll) handle contoured outlines, two V-cut saws score panelized arrays, and punch presses take high-volume simple outlines. A 2D vision system checks finished outline dimensions against the drawing before boards move to test.
Electrical test
Test capacity comes in three tiers. Five flying-probe machines (EMMA and HIOKI) take prototypes and medium lots with no fixture cost. Two high-density universal grid testers carry volume production. Seventeen dedicated fixture testers serve repeat orders; fixtures stay on file, so a returning customer’s re-run skips the setup work.
The lab behind the lines
A separate lab supports both production control and outgoing verification. Impedance coupons are measured on a Polar Cits500s tester paired with a Tektronix DSA8200 sampling oscilloscope. XRF units from Oxford (CMI series) read copper and gold thickness, and Leica metallography covers cross-sections of plated through-holes. Ion contamination, solder-mask coating thickness, and peel strength each run on dedicated instruments. An atomic absorption spectrometer (Varian AA240) tracks plating-bath chemistry, and an XRF analyzer (Skyray EDX2800) screens finished boards for RoHS compliance.
What this means for your build
Hardware sets the ceiling on what a plant can hold lot after lot. If your build sits near a process limit, mixes RF material with heavy copper, or needs a finish not covered above, put it in front of our engineers early: request an engineering review with your files attached. To see completed work across HDI, RF, and rigid-flex builds, browse the finished board examples in our mall.
