Clarity Design is not a typical electronics manufacturing services provider. Founded and led by engineers, the Southern California contract manufacturer has built its reputation on a simple but powerful principle: that design and manufacturing are strongest when they exist under one roof.
For Tom Lupfer, President and Founder, that philosophy has its roots in childhood. “My father manufactured ceramic capacitors all my life, so I always liked to go into work with him and see things being made,” he recalls. “I think that was in my DNA.”
That instinct never left him. Today, Clarity Design operates as both a full-service EMS provider and a fully staffed design and engineering firm, a combination that Lupfer believes creates something greater than the sum of its parts.”
We do take an engineering approach to manufacturing and to design here at Clarity Design. Having it all under one roof, our engineering presence makes our manufacturing stronger because we can help with fixturing and we also design for manufacturability. And it makes our designers better as well, because manufacturing gives them feedback as to the manufacturability of the products they design.”
That engineering-led approach has proven particularly valuable in one of the most demanding sectors in electronics manufacturing: medical devices. Clarity Design's entry into the medical space was organic, growing alongside a key customer before expanding into a core part of the business.
For all of Clarity Design's engineering strengths, there was one area where their SMT line had room to grow. They had no automated solder paste inspection or automated optical inspection and they knew it. "When we were looking at our SMT lines, that was the next improvement we wanted to make. We decided we wanted AOI & SPI. We looked at a couple of different options for used machines. We even brought one in-house and tried to hook it up and just evaluate its capabilities, and it just didn't seem like the value was there."
The path to Koh Young began not in a sales meeting, but with a pointed question from a prospective customer. "We were evaluated as a manufacturer by a company, and they said: you look great, except you don't have SPI and AOI," recalls Lupfer. "And I said, fine, when you see that technology at CMs, whose machines do you see? And they said the machines they see the most are Koh Young, out of South Korea." The connection came shortly after, at a trade show, when Lupfer encountered the Southern California Koh Young representative, Spencer Boone from PMR. A conversation followed. Then a demonstration that went way beyond a standard showroom run.
“They set up a demo at their facility. We actually brought some of our boards in and ran them through. That gave us a high degree of confidence that, yeah, that’s a good choice.”
“We brought a fully assembled board with components, and then we actually did a solder paste on two of the boards, and I held it on my lap as we drove up to Orange County. We got to see them go through the machines and pass, and then we got to induce some failures on both the assembled board and the solder paste board, and watch the machines pick up those issues.”
Gabe Krishnadasan
Process Engineer at Clarity Design
Smarter Lines, Better Decisions
The benefits of Koh Young’s SPI & AOI technology have been felt across every dimension of Clarity Design’s operation, from line efficiency to process improvement to the feedback loop between manufacturing and design.