Support Floor Life and Expiration Date Propagation#

Overview#

This feature enables the propagation of floor life and expiration date for sensitive materials (e.g., MSDs, solder paste) throughout the SMT assembly process. When enabled, the remaining floor life and expiration date of the most critical source material are inherited by the target material during operations like combining, assembling, or composing materials. However, if the target material already has a more critical (earlier) floor life or expiration date, that value will remain unchanged.

Concept#

In modern SMT operations, sensitive materials like MSDs and solder paste have limited floor life, which is the period they can remain exposed to environmental conditions before they degrade and become unreliable. Managing the floor life and expiration date of these materials is critical to ensuring product quality and preventing defects in the final assembly. This feature is designed to track and propagate these critical properties across materials throughout the SMT assembly process.

Propagation in SMT#

In SMT lines, materials often undergo multiple stages of assembly and processing. Sensitive materials like MSDs are exposed to ambient conditions during operations such as combining, composing, and assembling onto PCBs. As these materials interact with each other, it’s important that their floor life and expiration date is propagated to ensure that the target materials are not at risk of using expired or near-expiry components.

During operations, floor life propagation ensures that the target material (e.g., a PCB) inherits the most critical remaining floor life from the source materials it contains. The expiration date propagation works similarly, ensuring that the target material adopts the earliest expiration date of the source materials. If the target material already has a more critical floor life or expiration date (i.e., it is closer to expiry), its value remains unchanged, preserving the most critical condition.

Floor Life and Expiration Date Propagation#

The Floor Life and Expiration Date Propagation feature ensures that the most critical material properties - floor life remaining time and expiration date - are automatically passed from source materials to target materials during key SMT operations. This feature enables real-time tracking and management of these critical properties by CM MES, ensuring that the target materials always inherit the most critical values from the source materials.

At the Product Revision level, two attributes - SMTPropagateFloorLife and SMTPropagateExpirationDate - control whether floor life remaining time and expiration dates should be propagated. When these attributes are set to true, CM MES automatically propagates the floor life and expiration date from the source materials to the target materials during operations like combine, assemble, or compose materials. The goal is to ensure that materials exposed to expired or near-expiry components throughout the assembly process don't proceed, meaning they need to go into baking or be taken off the assembly line.

Supported Operations#

The list of supported CM MES operations is presented below:

1. Combine Material
2. Compose Material
3. Automatic Assemble Material
4. Assemble Material
5. Replace Assembled Material
6. Special Replace Assembled Material

Usage#

Let's consider a basic SMT process scenario with a Lot Material. After expanding the Lot into a Panel, and then the Panel into a Board, we want to perform the Automatic Assemble Material operation of Consumable Materials into the Boards. In CM MES, once a BOM has been created and configured, we need to specify which Products are eligible for propagation and which properties to propagate.

When navigating to the desired Product page, set the attributes SMTPropagateFloorLife and SMTPropagateExpirationDate to true. This will indicate to CM MES that this Consumable Material Product needs to be evaluated for Floor Life and Expiration Date Propagation.
Moving on to the Consumable Materials creation, we can define a more critical (near expiry) date on one of these materials, as well as a lower remaining floor life, when compared to the Board Material.

Consumable Material Expiration Date and Floor Life Remaining Time:

Board Material Expiration Date and Floor Life Remaining Time:

Upon the Automatic Assemble Materials operation, the most critical expiration date and the lower remaining floor life will be propagated to the Board material:

Administration#

In order to propagate floor life and expiration date, source materials should have their product attributes, SMTPropagateFloorLife and/or SMTPropagateExpirationDate, set to true.