Abstract
In the 1970's, much development occurred in monolithic IC's and automatic insertion machines, which brought about extensive changes among mass producers of electronic consumer products and greatly influenced the improvement of quality and the saving of labor in production. The challenges of the next era are the achievement of the following four objectives in addition to the quality improvement and labor saving objectives involved in the recent decade. 1) The efficient use of material resources to eliminate waste, 2) elevation of reliability, 3) striving for uniform specifications for components on a worldwide basis to achieve more rational and efficient operations, and 4) the creation of unique products through new mounting and assembly techniques. Towards these objectives, a unique technology has been developed which has been named ‘universal hybrid integrated circuits’ (UHIC), for which the automatic production system has been put into practical use. The various components used in assembling through this system are cylindrical in shape and entirely new in concept. They are called ‘metal electrode facebonding’ (MELF) type components. The new production system has the capacity of mounting 600 components simultaneously and can handle circuit boards up to a size of 330 millimeters per side. This means that a stereo unit or a color television set can easily be assembled on one circuit board, which could be called “all-in-one UHIC”.