Dedicated to aerospace and defense embedded electronics
Aerospace and defense embedded electronics programs need rugged electronics that are able to withstand harsh environments, including shock, vibration, extreme temperatures, and corrosive surroundings. They demand the highest levels of quality and reliability and they require quick responses to program issues and to urgent orders.
Curtiss-Wright's in-house manufacturing capability delivers a combination of responsiveness, flexibility, and quality that far exceeds anything achievable by contract manufacturing. The video provides an inside look at this facility and some of its advanced equipment.
Curtiss-Wright manufacturing capabilities include
- Both leaded and lead-free soldering
- ROHS
- ITAR and non-ITAR
- Class 3 of IPC and J-STD
- Environmental Stress Screening for every rugged board
- Three options for conformal coating
- Acrylic
- Urethane
- Parylene
Video Transcript
Welcome to one of Curtiss-Wright's state-of-the-art electronics manufacturing facilities.
This hundred thousand foot, high capacity factory is focused on meeting the needs of aerospace and defense embedded electronics programs. The mission here is to deliver products with the highest quality to Curtiss-Wright customers, reliably, efficiently, and on time.
Our customers are aerospace and defense programs with unique requirements for the electronics they deploy in embedded systems. They need rugged electronics that are able to withstand harsh environments, including shock, vibration, extreme temperatures, and corrosive surroundings. They demand the highest levels of quality and reliability possible regardless of the environment. And they require quick responses to program issues and to urgent orders.
We are a high mix, low to medium volume facility. That means we often build quantities of one, or even up to 100. There is mandatory training around IPC training which is the industry standard for what we do here. We do J Standard training as well as repair standard training. The heart of what we do is the SMP process, and that is where we are placing components onto our board. Then there is the testing which is customer-specific and our thermal cycling which also is customer-specific.
We're attempting to evolve our facility so when we buy new equipment we ensure the equipment can be networked, we ensure the equipment has the ability to collect data, store data, and create a dashboard of that data to allow us to improve. As we've gone paperless we want to ensure that we know where every card is on the facility floor. So high use of our coding, we actually scan boards into a location, electronically we know where it is and physically it's easy to grab.
We do lead-free, leaded and we are also RoHS compliant. We have three types of conformal coating. We have acrylic, urethane, and parylene.
We manufacture both ITAR and non-ITAR products on a regular basis using processes that are all geared for the highest quality and reliability levels; Class 3 of IPC and J Standard. This is a major difference from contract manufacturers that will also build to Class 1 and Class 2 levels.
In response to customers’ needs, we have also implemented unique processes for rugged products. And to ensure schedule responsiveness, we maintain close interactions between engineering and manufacturing, which is simplified by the fact that the entire team is in the same building. This makes it easier to resolve issues quickly.
From an ESS perspective, we start off with a vibration step to ensure the integrity of the product that we've assembled. Following that, we have in excess of 17 chambers that allow us to load, set up profiles that are specific to our customer needs, and run to ensure the thermal integrity of their product.
This state-of-the-art facility delivers products to meet the requirements of customers around the world. A Curtiss-Wright in-house manufacturing capability that supports aerospace and defense programs with an unmatched combination of responsiveness, flexibility, and quality.