Traceability requirements in PCB manufacturing continue to tighten, particularly for automotive, medical, aerospace and defence applications. Customers increasingly expect process data to be linked not just to a production lot, but to each individual panel.
Schmoll multi-station drilling machines support this with Data Matrix code reading at every station. Each station identifies the panel or stack it is processing independently, so the machine records which panel was drilled at which station, with which program and under which process conditions.
This includes the scaling coefficients applied at each station. As panels can shrink or expand differently during previous process steps, the machine compensates for this material distortion individually, and the coefficients used are stored together with the panel’s code. This makes it possible to trace exactly how each panel was corrected and to analyse dimensional behaviour across lots and materials.
The result is a direct link between the physical panel and its process history:
- Panel-level identification at every station, rather than one identification per machine or per batch
- Recorded scaling coefficients per station, assigned to the individual panel
- Process data such as drill program, tool usage and timestamps linked to each panel
- Straightforward data handover to the customer’s MES for complete production records
Together with Schmoll’s Industry 4.0 features and machine connectivity, station-level code reading gives manufacturers a reliable basis for quality analysis, root-cause investigation and customer audits.
