Joe Booth, Chief Executive Officer, Altus Group Ltd.
Jasper Whitefield, Business Development Manager, Cambertronics
Brent A. Fischthal, Head of Global Marketing Communications, Koh Young
Every process engineer knows the frustration: a board clears placement, moves through reflow, and only then reveals a bridged joint or an open that traces straight back to solder paste. By that point, the damage is done. Rework consumes time, disrupts scheduling, and chips away at the first-pass yield numbers that matter most to a contract manufacturer’s reputation. The question is not whether solder paste quality affects assembly outcomes. It does. The question is whether you find out early enough to do something about it.
For Cambertronics, a contract electronics manufacturer based in Surrey, England, the answer was to move the inspection point upstream. Founded in 1991 and accredited to ISO 9001:2015 with IPC 610-trained staff, Cambertronics serves a demanding cross-section of industries including aerospace and defense, automotive, telecommunications, and oil and gas. In that environment, consistent quality is not a differentiator. It is the baseline. Which is exactly why the team decided its existing inspection setup needed reinforcing at the print stage.
Cambertronics had operated a solid inspection regime for years, combining benchtop AOI, visual inspection, X-ray, and functional testing. But as component pitches tightened and aperture sizes shrank to accommodate finer geometries, the team recognized that AOI, effective as it is, inherits whatever the printer produces. It catches defects; it does not prevent them.
Working with Altus Group, a technology partner Cambertronics had engaged in 2024, the team evaluated its options before selecting the Koh Young KY8030-3 3D Solder Paste Inspection system. Koh Young commands approximately 50% of the global SPI market and has built that position on the strength of true 3D volumetric measurement, a meaningful distinction from 2D systems that infer paste volume from area coverage alone.
Cambertronics' investment reflects a wider shift in how serious contract manufacturers are thinking about process control. As component geometries continue to shrink and customer tolerance for field failures narrows, the case for intervening at the print stage rather than the inspection stage grows stronger. SPI is no longer a nice-to-have sitting between printer and placer.
“It is exciting to get the Koh Young unit into our facility, a significant enhancement to ensuring the highest quality output for our customers. More importantly, it allows us to keep our first-time right as high as possible, minimizing time spent on rework and enabling us to focus on value-added internal activities. In a competitive market, we strive to achieve maximum success, and making these strategic investments is crucial to reaching that goal. We had heard a lot about Koh Young beforehand and their market-leading position, so having this technology in our facility shows our intent to maintain those high standards.”
Jasper Whitefield
Electronics Manufacturing, Cambertronics.
Stopping Defects at the Source.
For manufacturers competing on quality and reliability, it is increasingly the foundation on which everything else is built.