Impel Gen6 high-speed backplane product automatic line of a certain company

The computing power and network capabilities of large data centers continue to improve, placing higher bandwidth, lower latency and higher reliability requirements on high-speed backplane products. Impel Gen6 is a high-speed backplane product for Alibaba data center infrastructure upgrade, with a core transmission rate of 24Gbps. Focusing on the needs of Alibaba data center and Molex Impel high-speed backplane manufacturing needs, MIJOINT Intelligent provides an automated complete line solution covering terminal assembly and welding, cable routing, wire processing, resistance welding, injection molding and shield assembly and welding.

Project background

Data center high-speed backplane products usually have complex structures, long process links, and high assembly accuracy requirements. The Impel Gen6 project not only requires the automated assembly of multiple key parts such as terminals, wires, and shielding sheets, but also requires maintaining a stable rhythm and consistent quality between welding, wiring, wire processing, injection molding, and inspection.

It is a next-generation high-speed backplane product customized and developed for the needs of Alibaba data centers, focusing on solving the high-bandwidth, low-latency, and high-reliability hardware interconnection needs of large data centers. For the production side, this means that the equipment must not only be able to produce it, but also be able to produce it stably, continuously, and detectably.

Automation solution

MIJOINT intelligently planned a complete line for the Impel Gen6 project. The processes include terminal assembly and welding, automatic or manual wiring, line processing, resistance welding, injection molding, shield assembly and welding, and assembly and welding dimensions are detected through AOI. The entire line layout includes terminal assembly and welding machines, automatic wiring machines, manual wiring machines, wire processing machines, resistance welding, injection molding and shielding sheet assembly and welding machines.

In the project, the wires and terminals adopt the A/B carrier method, which has high precision and good consistency. The terminal mold cutting accuracy reaches ±0.01mm, and the wire processing uses a cam head. The structure is compact, which helps improve the stability of the workstation and space utilization. In the resistance welding process, the equipment is equipped with pre-welding/post-welding AOI inspection, and the shielding sheets are assembled using visual guidance to reduce errors caused by manual judgment and manual assembly.

Process Difficulties

The main difficulties of the Impel Gen6 project focus on three aspects. The first is the consistency control of terminals and wires. High-speed backplane products have very high requirements for terminal pitch, terminal flushness and welding consistency. The PPT marked terminal pitch size requirement is ±0.02mm, and the terminal flushness requirement is ±0.01mm. If the terminal assembly deviation is too large, it will affect subsequent welding, shield assembly and final electrical performance.

The second is welding quality control. The project clearly requires that there should be no problems such as fried welding, missing welding, welding slag, and weak welding. Both terminal assembly and welding and shielding assembly and welding require process inspection and pressure control to ensure that there is no gap between the shielding and the terminal, and to avoid crushing the pins.

The third is the integration of complex processes. Terminal assembly, cable routing, wire processing, resistance welding, injection molding and shielding sheet welding can originally be dispersed into multiple work sections. However, in the large-scale manufacturing scenario of high-speed backplanes in data centers, customers require continuous, stable, and traceable automated production lines. MIJOINT integrates these processes into an operational production line solution through carrier accuracy, cam head, visual guidance and AOI inspection.

Customer value

The Impel Gen6 automatic line helps customers integrate key assembly, welding and inspection links in high-speed backplane manufacturing into a unified automation process. Compared with methods that rely on manual labor or dispersed equipment, the entire line solution can reduce manual operation fluctuations and improve the consistency of terminal assembly, shielding sheet assembly, and welding inspection.

For data center infrastructure products, highly reliable connections and stable batch delivery are equally important. In this project, MIJOINT Intelligence demonstrated its full line planning capabilities for high-speed backplane products for large data centers, and also accumulated reusable capabilities such as terminal precision assembly, shielding sheet visual guidance, welding AOI inspection, and complex process integration.