Juki Automation Systems Europe signed an OEM re-selling agreement with Cogiscan to integrate RFID Smart feeder technology in the new generation of SMT placement machines.

The Cogiscan solution is replacing the previous smart feeder technology that required electrical contact between the feeder and the machine feeder bank. Juki selected RFID because of its unique benefits in terms of flexibility and reliability. In addition this technology offers all the capabilities of the most expensive smart feeders at a very affordable cost, further lowering the overall cost of ownership for Juki customers.

David Kvavle, Manager of Technical Services for Juki Automation Systems: "When we started looking at RFID we heard about Cogiscan and we contacted them to discuss our requirements. We were impressed by their expertise with RFID, the result of 5 years of working with this technology in the electronics manufacturing environment. Cogiscan already had a proven solution that only required minor adaptation and integration to work with our existing machines and software. This allowed Juki to come up with a world-class solution in a very short timeframe. Our customers will also appreciate the fact that the solution can be further expanded and seamlessly integrated with the entire range of material tracking solutions available from Cogiscan."

The new RFID smart feeder technology is called IFS-X, which stands for Next generation of Intelligent Feeder Systems. The software products offered by Juki take full advantage of the information captured by the RFID smart feeders to enable several critical applications, including feeder setup validation and real-time inventory, both online and offline, as well as component lot traceability.

The new RFID smart feeders were officially introduced at the recent SMT trade show in Nuremberg and the market response has already exceeded expectations with several systems on order from key customers for the new KE-2050 and KE-2060 machines. Other machines models are under development and will be available as field retrofit kits.