The SlimKIC 2000™ is a tool that records the thermal profile of a product in a conveyorized thermal process such as a solder reflow oven. It also includes software that determines whether or not the profile is in spec, and that helps the user find an oven recipe that will put the profile in spec.
Recently, the KIC R&D department developed a software option to the SlimKIC 2000 called Auto-Focus™ that uses the information from previously run products to calculate a good first oven recipe for a new product. The Quality Assurance department at KIC was asked to develop a comprehensive test that would qualitatively show how well the Auto-Focus option with the SlimKIC 2000 finds oven recipes. Specifically, we were asked to answer the following questions:
This report will describe the test procedure and display the test results.
Equipment Used
Setup and Profiling Tools
The basic SlimKIC 2000 kit includes the SlimKIC, which has either 9 or 12 Type K thermocouple inputs (all of our testing was done with a 9 channel unit). We tested with the optional radio receiver that allows the SlimKIC data to be transferred to the PC without plugging a wire into a hot datalogger at the end of the profile.
With the SlimKIC 2000 you can purchase two software options. The less expensive option is called the Navigator™. The Navigator is an “oven recipe search engine” that automatically finds the one best oven recipe after a profile is run. The Navigator has been available for several years. The more complete option is called Auto-Focus which includes all of the capabilities of the Navigator, plus it finds an appropriate oven recipe beforerunning the first profile. This option was released in March of 2003. The tests in this paper were performed with the Auto-Focus option (which includes all the Navigator capabilities).