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Like any process, it is important to find the positives and negatives. Orbital welding is a process with a lot of positives for your company, so it is important to see what it can offer your company. By implementing orbital welding into your operations, the company can become more efficient and produce much more high [...]

Quite simply, orbital welding is the welding of a circular or orbital object (like a tube) to a substrate or to another, similar tube, executed by a GTAW weld head. Pioneered for airplane manufacturing in the 1960′s for affixing the noses to the bodies of airplanes, orbital welding has since been employed in fields from [...]

Industrialization and automation have taught us the value of machines: a good machine can do a lot more work than a person a lot faster and a lot more reliably. This truth isn’t limited to tractors or robotic arms either. As technologies advance they demand higher technology from the processes used to produce them. Semiconductor [...]

Even though the past five years have given birth to the emergence of a slew of competing technologies – iPhone vs. Blackberry, E-reader vs. Kindle, Garmin vs. TomTom – many of these products share many components in common. While competition among component makers is fierce, the somewhat uniform demands of OEMs are  putting pressure on [...]

Recent economic weakness has translated into weaker-than-expected demand for chips and other high-tech widgets, as companies and consumers cut back capital expenditures and discretionary spending. Yet regardless of whether the economy charts a ‘V’ or ‘W’ course going forward, Moore’s law ensures that consumes will be getting more technology for less, and that the long-term [...]

Nearly all of our customers involved in semiconductor manufacturing or research have been affected by the recent downturn in the economy. Good business management dictates that capital expenditures ought to be the first expense to cut in order to keep margins as wide as possible. Yet cutting capital expenditures for many customers means not investing [...]

Automated welding is a staple of the modern production environment. Yet different processes – i.e., implementations – demand vastly different tools. Automobile manufacturers, for instance, often employ laser or plasma welders attached to robotic arms – file footage many of us are familiar with from recent economic news. Other applications require greater sophistication so that [...]

For SEMs and semiconductor manufacturers alike, fixed costs represent a far greater portion of per-unit production cost than materials than it does in other businesses. Clean-room environments and gas delivery systems are expensive to build and maintain while substrate, tubes, and crystals are relatively inexpensive on a per-unit basis. Thus, margin expansion for users of [...]