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Amada Weld Tech (stylized as AMADA WELD TECH), a subsidiary of Amada Weld Tech Co., Ltd., designs and manufactures equipment and systems for resistance welding, laser welding, laser marking, laser cutting, laser micro machining, hermetic sealing, micro tig welding, and hot bar reflow soldering and bonding.[1][2][3][4][5][6] Established in 1948, AMADA WELD TECH is headquartered in Monrovia, California, US. The company's equipment is used in numerous industries, chiefly medical, aerospace, automotive, battery production, and electronic component manufacturing. Amada Weld Tech has approximately 200 employees, with 7 sales and manufacturing offices serving about 12,000 customers worldwide. More than 80,000 items are manufactured annually. The company is certified to ISO 9001:2015, China Compulsory Certificate (CCC), European Conformity (CE), and Canadian Standards Association (CSA) quality certifications.
| Company type | Private |
|---|---|
| Industry | Industrial Equipment |
| Headquarters | Monrovia, California , USA |
Area served | Worldwide |
Key people | David Fawcett (President and CEO), Kunio Minejima (COO), Hatsumi Bullard (CFO) |
| Revenue | US $64 million
Consolidated revenue for parent company, Amada Miyachi Corporation - ¥20 billion Consolidated net sales for parent company, Amada Co., Ltd.* – ¥200 billion |
| Website | www |
Amada Weld Tech Co., Ltd.
editAmada Weld Tech's parent company, Amada Weld Tech Co., Ltd., was founded in 1972 to manufacture and market semiconductor-related measuring instruments and welding control equipment in response to the demand for quality control in the automobile, television, and electronics industries. The company incorporated microprocessors and other electronic devices into its resistance welders to enable high quality precision joining and monitoring and analysis. Its Weld Checkers™ are used worldwide for weld monitoring.[7]
In 1984, the company developed a neodymium-doped yttrium aluminum garnet (Nd:YAG) laser welder that allowed for more precise and micro welding, and this product line became a central component of the company's business, along with resistance welding. In 2006, the company developed the first Yb: fiber laser welder in Japan.
Amada Weld Tech Co., Ltd. has more than 600 employees (consolidated), in 10 sales offices and 2 factories in Japan, and 7 subsidiary companies (Amada Weld Tech Inc., Amada Weld Tech Gmbh, Amada Weld Tech Korea Co., Ltd., Amada Weld Tech Shanghai Co., Ltd., Amada (Thailand) Co., Ltd., Amada Weld Tech India Pvt., Ltd., Amada Weld Tech Taiwan CO., Ltd., and Amada Vietnam Co., Ltd. and 4 factories overseas (China, USA, Germany, Thailand). Annual revenue is ¥20 billion.
Amada Weld Tech is an Amada Group Company. It is headquartered in Isehara, Kanagawa, Japan and develops, manufactures, sells, and services products and systems for metal sheet processing, metal cutting, pressing, and machine tooling. The company was established in 1946 and is listed on the Tokyo Stock Exchange (6113:Tokyo). It has 60 subsidiaries (17 in Japan and 43 overseas) and more than 7000 employees worldwide. Annual revenue exceeds ¥200 billion.
Products
editAmada Weld Tech specializes in the design and manufacture of welding, marking, cutting and bonding equipment, as well as automated systems. Major products include:
- Standard and customized laser and resistance systems – Application qualification and testing, system specification, assembly, system verification, and installation and training. Included are gloveboxes and dryboxes, tooling, motion, optics, software, monitoring.
- Laser marking equipment – Fiber laser markers, semi-automated workstations, custom tooling, accessories and consumables.
- Laser welding equipment – Fiber and Nd:YAG laser welders, pulsed and continuous wave, automated and semi-automated workstations, fiber optic cables, custom tooling, accessories and consumables.
- Laser cutting and micromachining – Systems with up to 5 axes of coordinated motion, proprietary position-based firing laser control, for stainless steel, copper, silver, titanium, platinum iridium, and plastics. Fiber or femtosecond lasers.
- Resistance welding – Power supplies (linear DC, high and mid frequency inverters, capacitive discharge, AC weld controls), weld monitors and checkers, displacement monitors, weld heads (manual and air actuated, servo-motor controlled, electromagnetic), accessories and consumables.
- Heat seal bonding – Reflow and heat seal power supplies, automated and semi-automated workstations, FPD repair stations, thermodes, accessories and consumables for connecting flexible circuits and PC boards or LCD screens.
Applications
editAmada Weld Tech currently offers seven different technologies, which the company combines to create end-to-end assembly joining solutions to facilitate reliable and repeatable welding. A few of the key application areas include:
- Medical devices – laser welding, laser marking, and laser cutting technologies for welding, marking, sealing and cutting state-of-the-art medical devices made of both plastic and metal, including cardiac pacemakers, defibrillators, guidewires, catheters, cannulae, hearing aids, brachyseeds, orthodontic appliances, prosthetics, and surgical tools. The company's laser welding and resistance welding equipment and atmospheric enclosures were used in the production of a cochlear implant shown in this [1] video.
- Aerospace – welding of batteries, sensors, displays, and jet engine honeycomb manufacture and repair.
- Automotive – direct part marking with text, graphics, bar codes and data matrix codes; laser welding, laser marking and engraving, resistance welding, and hot bar reflow soldering of sensors, switches, dashboard electronics, lighting components, and brake shoes.
- Electronic components – resistance and laser welding of hard drive read/write armatures, hard disk assemblies, electrical connectors, lead frame assemblies, relay terminal connections, and batteries.
Patents
editAmada Weld Tech has been awarded numerous patents for its resistance and laser welding inventions, over the period 1971 through the present, including the following:[8]
| Name of Invention | Number | Date of Patent | Assignee | Inventor |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Wire Bonder | 3,601,304 | 24-Aug-71 | Unitek Corp | Momtar Nasshi Mansour |
| Arm Assembly for Bonding Apparatus | 3,664,567 | 23-May-72 | Unitek Corp | Joseph Laub |
| Pulsed Heat Eutectic Bonder | 3,790,738 | 5-Feb-74 | Unitek Corp | Joseph Laub & Jenkins Griffith |
| Pulse Heated Thermocompression Bonding Apparatus | 3,891,822 | 24-Jun-75 | Unitek Corp | Joseph Laub & John F. Hurst |
| Bonding Apparatus Utilizing Pivotally Mounted Bounding Arm | 3,940,047 | 24-Feb-76 | Unitek Corp | Joseph Laub |
| Voltage Regulated Capacitive Discharge Welding Power Supply | 4,228,340 | 14-Oct-80 | Unitek Corp | Gerald Dufrenne |
| Direct Current Pulse | 4,564,735 | 14-Jan-86 | Unitek Corp | Gerald Dufrenne |
| Weld resistance Measuring Apparatus for a Spot Welder | 4,639,569 | 27-Jan-87 | Unitek Corp | Gerald Dufrenne |
| Titiable Electric Thermode for Multiple Connection Reflow Soldering | 4,871,899 | 3-Oct-89 | Unitek Corp | Gerald Dufrenne |
| Apparatus and Method for Monitoring Weld Quality | 5,081,092 | 14-Jan-92 | Unitek Equipment | Gerald Dufrenne |
| Motorized Weld Head | 5,225,647 | 6-Jul-93 | Unitek Equipment | Gerald Dufrenne |
| Fast Response Weld Head | 5,386,092 | 31-Jan-95 | Unitek Equipment | Gerald Dufrenne |
| Method and Apparatus for Automatically Adjusting Air Pressure in a Pneumatic Weld Head | 5,954,976 | 21-Sep-99 | Unitek Miyachi | Talal M. Al-Nabulsi |
| Reflow Soldering Self-Aligning Fixture | 6,047,875 | 11-Apr-00 | Unitek Miyachi | Talal M. Al-Nabulsi |
| Reflow Soldering Self-Aligning Fixture | US 6,047,875 B1 | 5-Jun-01 | Unitek Corp | Talal M. Al-Nabulsi |
| Method and Apparatus for Automatically Adjusting Air Pressure in a Pneumatic Weld Head | US 6,294,750 B1 | 25-Sep-01 | Unitek Miyachi | Talal M. Al-Nabulsi |
| Laser Weld Monitor | US 6,670,574 B1 | 30-Dec-03 | Unitek Miyachi | Gregory Bates & Girish Kelkar |
| Green Welding Laser | US 7,088,749 B2 | 8-Aug-06 | Miyachi Unitek | Shinichi Nakayama, Girish Kelkar & Gregory Bates |
| Laser Weld Monitor | US 7,129,438 B1 | 31-Oct-06 | Unitek Miyachi | Gregory Bates & Girish Kelkar |
References
edit- ^ [1]Klas Weman, Welding processes handbook, Woodhead Publishing Ltd and CRC Press LLC, 2003.
- ^ [2]Edison Welding Institute (EWI), http://ewi.org/technologies/resistance-processes; http://ewi.org/technologies/laser-processing-main Archived 2013-01-28 at the Wayback Machine, retrieved September 12, 2012.
- ^ [3]Survey of Joining, Cutting, and Allied Processes, http://www.aws.org/img/weldinghandbook/01.pdf Archived 2012-12-03 at the Wayback Machine, Resistance welding – p. 18; Laser welding, p. 32.
- ^ [4]Resistance welding, TWI Ltd, http://www.twi.co.uk/technologies/welding-coating-and-material-processing/resistance-welding/?locale=en Archived 2013-10-29 at the Wayback Machine, retrieved October 15, 2012.
- ^ [5] Laser welding, TWI Ltd, http://www.twi.co.uk/technologies/welding-coating-and-material-processing/lasers/laser-welding/?locale=en Archived 2013-10-29 at the Wayback Machine, retrieved October 15, 2012.
- ^ [6]Hot bar reflow (surface mount technology), Status of the Technology, Industry Activities and Action Plan, Surface Mount Council, August 1999, http://www.ipc.org/4.0_Knowledge/4.1_Standards/smcstatus.pdf#xml=http://localhost/texis/searchipc/pdfhi.txt?query=hot+bar+soldering&pr=IPC-NonMember&prox=page&rorder=500&rprox=500&rdfreq=0&rwfreq=1000&rlead=750&rdepth=31&sufs=1&order=r&cq=&sr=-1&id=506651b17 Archived 2015-12-28 at the Wayback Machine, retrieved October 15, 2012.
- ^ [7]Miyachi Corporation Profile, History, http://www.miyachi.com/e/corporate/outline/history.html, retrieved September 12, 2012.
- ^ [10]United States Patent and Trademark Offices, Patent Full Text Databases, http://patft.uspto.gov/ Archived 2012-10-19 at the Wayback Machine, retrieved September 12, 2012.