Apex – Two NPI Awards 2022

Europlacer has secured top honors in two New Product Introduction (NPI) categories in the prestigious awards organized by Circuits Assembly magazine and notified at the IPC APEX Expo in San Diego in January.

This year’s official award presentation took place last week during a virtual ceremony. The Europlacer Americas team is delighted to be able to announce that it won the Component Placement – High Speed NPI Award for the Europlacer ii-A2 pick & place module as well as the Component Placement – Accessories Technologies NPI Award for the ii-Tab mobile productivity management solution. The ii-Tab intelligently integrates eight key process applications to manage productivity across an entire manufacturing facility.

The Europlacer ii-A2 high-speed pick & place machine was launched in 2021 and, along with its ultra-flexible sibling the ii-A1, was the world’s first placement machine to achieve CFX certification. The awards panel judges commended the ii-A2 for its compact footprint and for its modular concept that allows line productivity to be boosted with minimal real estate. The judges also recognized the value of Europlacer’s ii-Tab as a smart and highly practical real-time management tool optimized to support factory-wide surface mount process efficiency.

Lead awards judge and President of the Printed Circuit Engineering Association, Mike Buetow, commented that the panel noted a distinction between “compliant and non-compliant CFX lines in the award entries”, expressing a preference towards software that’s ‘equipment agnostic’, such as that deployed on Europlacer’s fully CFX-compliant placement platforms.