ASTON, PA — It can take hours to manually change the tooling on a printer or pick-and-place system. PSA Systems, a privately owned PA-based engineering and manufacturing firm, recently partnered with Charles Moncavage, inventor of a popular line of automatic SMT tooling systems.
Now a division of PSA, Michael McHale, PSA’s CEO, and Moncavage are rebooting and upgrading the line of products, now known as Matrix Automatic SMT Support Tooling. The pin tooling system can be installed in minutes, facilitating simple product changeovers through its Smart Touch operator interface. It provides clear operator instructions, feather-light setup force and a rigid locking system.

History and Development

SMT Tooling goes back to around 1998, when Moncavage worked for DRK. One of his projects was to come up with an automatic tooling solution. Grid-lok and FormFlex were the results of this labor, and after leaving the company in 2008, Moncavage developed Quik-Tool and grew the technology.
“When I invented this product in the late 90s, the tooling was based on the then-current state-of-the-art circuit board,” says Moncavage. “Back then, substrate thickness and component density were much different than today. Over the years, boards have become thinner, components are much smaller and more densely packed, and customers today require much more precise tooling.”

Read the rest of the article in U.S Tech March edition here.

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