KIC Press Release February 5, 2001 - KIC Pilot Wins 2000 SMT Vision Award

(San Diego, CA -- February 5, 2001) : KIC has been awarded the 2000 SMT Vision Award in the software category for its KIC® Pilot™ automated reflow oven setup software. The Vision Award for the KIC Pilot is KIC‘s second in three years. In 1998, KIC‘s Auto-Predict™ Software Option won the SMT Vision Award for software.

The Vision Awards, presented annually by SMT Magazine, recognize companies that have uniquely advanced surface mount technology or demonstrated "visionary" development of new products to meet the challenges facing the electronics assembly industry. KIC‘s winning entry, the KIC Pilot, is an automated reflow oven setup system that interfaces directly with the oven controller. The Pilot features an animation-based user interface which allows a low-skilled operator with one hour‘s training to setup the reflow process. The process engineer retains over-all control by defining the process parameters, but can delegate the actual setup tasks to the line operators. The Pilot guarantees error-free operations and determines the ONE BEST possible oven setup.

A key feature of the Pilot is the Process Window Index (PWI). The PWI is used to evaluate the quality of a profile by reducing all profile statistics to a single number. A PWI of 0% is optimum, less than 100% is in spec, above 100% is out of spec. The Pilot automatically finds the oven setup that provides the lowest PWI.

Until now, the operator has been responsible for controlling the oven. With the Pilot software, the oven has the intelligence to tell the operator how to set it up, and will not allow the operator to run product if the profile is out of spec. In effect, the KIC Pilot‘s intelligent system controls the operator.

About KIC
Based in San Diego, KIC is the industry leader in automated thermal management tools and systems for reflow, wave, cure and semiconductor thermal processes. The company pioneered the development of oven profilers and process development tools. KIC remains on the leading edge of the thermal industry with innovative tools for process development, optimization and real-time management.