Just for show: despite talk of crackdowns, the show floor reveals IP pilfering is alive and well.

If you've never walked the Nepcon China trade show, here's what you have missed:

* Boatloads of attendees.

* Scores of vendors (some of whom actually paid for their booths).

* The potential to buy watches, jewelry and other trinkets from some of the most aggressive salesmen you may ever meet (some of whom are badged!).

* IP theft at its most brazen.

I thought I had sufficiently burrowed myself away for a chat with Dr. David Bernard in the Dage booth, hidden by walls on three sides and machines on the fourth. The first time the fake Rolex watch salesman discovered me, I was more amazed than annoyed. By the fourth time he returned, however, let's just say that if he didn't know how to curse in English then, he does now.

All around the show, the con men were bolder than ever. On a setup day, while standing just outside the booth of a well-known maker of soldering equipment, I watched while a handful of men with digital cameras put on a contortionist's display that would make Houdini proud, twisting their way in and around and under the machine, snapping pictures all the while.

Then there were the knockoff artists that paid to be there. Some of the machines here bear a striking resemblance to those developed by Western equipment makers. In some extreme cases, the locals even bring their knockoffs to the show--and brag about how they've improved on the original design! The fellows snapping photos at the soldering OEM's booth may very well be plotting the same; I didn't ask.

Up on the China floor (more on that in a moment) one "maker" of soldering equipment showed off its wave equipment. The logo and design of Hexi Electronic Equipment's (hexiele.com) reflow oven looked a lot--a lot--like a well-known Western brand (Figure 1). Another company's logo looked a lot like DEK's. A third showed a printer that strongly resembled EKRA's X-5 (Figure 2).

This is not to paint all--or even the majority--of Chinese companies with the guilty brush. Perhaps it doesn't even matter. As the former head of one major SMT equipment supplier once remarked to me, "When you get down to it, what's a car? Four wheels and an engine." On the contrary, some very solid and low cost (and original) gear was on hand. All in all, I saw seven wave soldering baths, eight reflow machines, one selective soldering machine, two printers and the most ridiculous placement machine ever (which seemed to be missing its hood). Also on display were two testers, two AOI machines, one 3-D SPI and a few soldering irons.

I saw one miniature turnkey line on display by Union (which looked similar to the one the company showed last year). Otek (otek.com.cn) had multiple desktop AOIs priced between $15,000 and $35,000. JET/Kunshan Xunjie Electronic Co. (jettech.com) had a bed-of-nails tester and a 3-D SPI machine. One of the largest local OEMs, Nousstar (nousstar.com), showed what looked to be some very solid reflow and wave soldering equipment, the latter a double-wave, [N.sub.2] version designed for Pb-free. They are qualified to Sony, Panasonic, Sanyo, Samsung and Canon. (Nousstar also makes assorted screen printers.)

[FIGURE 1 OMITTED]

The Chinese companies are relegated to the top floor of the Everbright Convention Center, for which they pay a lower price than their better-known competitors but are located far from the action. Downstairs, Western and other Asian vendors were out in full force. Universal Instruments, Speedline Technologies, Assembleon, Samsung, DEK and several others gobbled up the first floor. Meanwhile, EKRA, Indium, Aim, Cookson and other familiar names occupied the second.

[FIGURE 2 OMITTED]

Unlike the bare-board side, new equipment for the most part still debuts in Europe and North America. At Nepcon China and other Asian shows, one may see some new features to previously introduced models. Among the new offerings:

* Siemens (siplace.com) rolled out its D-Series gantry-style placement line, which comes with one to four heads, offline teaching software and an on-board digital camera for component recognition. The series will be made available region by region over the next six months.

* MVP (machinevisionproducts.com) showed its new Table-Top AutoInspector, which has the same camera as the higher-end 1820 model and can see components down to 0402.

* Europlacer (europlacer.com) showed its Xpress 25T placement machine, capable of speeds up to 28,000 cph. It handles parts from 0201s to 50 [mm.sup.2].

* Speedprint (speedprint-tech.com) revealed its SPRINTavi, which handles standard 29" frames and features laser tooling and 2-D "paste on stencil" inspection.

* ICON Technologies (iconprinter.com) displayed the i-8 printer based on a DEK platform, featuring vacuum tooling, stencil wipe, multilingual software, paste-on-pad verification, and a reported 50 [micro]m accuracy.

* EFD (efdsolder.com) rolled out ProcessMate 3000, a tool that adds process control and yield improvement to certain manual soldering functions. It has a linear axis slide with a controller that can operate a heating tool or hot air gun. "It's a way to go from manual soldering to semiautomatic, and takes the technique variable out of the equation," explained market development manager Don Cornell. The tool can be daisy-chained with a dispenser and reflow.

Show management has its work cut out for it. The show is bursting at its seams, and the building itself appears grossly outdated for a large equipment show. Some of the larger exhibitors expressed direct and emphatic concern over everything from the intermittent air pressure--which occasionally dropped during product demonstrations--to the apparently relaxed standards for fire safety (see Caveat Lector, page XX). The outmoded convention center at times undermined an otherwise high quality and well-attended event.

Picked Up Parts

* Attendance appeared up, but not as many service and smaller companies exhibited this year.

* BTU International has added a building, its third, at its Shanghai campus. The Shanghai plant builds four ovens, two seven-zone and two 10-zone models.

* The show segregates suppliers by product type; for example, all the test and inspection equipment is grouped together, as are the solder vendors. This makes it easy for visitors to find and compare similar products, and is a real plus for the show.

* Siemens forecast the SMT equipment market would grow 5% CAGR from 2006 to 2009.

* Tyco Electronics has opened an engineering and R & D center in Shanghai.

* Kyzen predicted the amount of product cleaned in China will rise to 40% or more, from about 20% today.

* Kester's plant in Suzhou is ready to produce materials. The solder materials company will move some manufacturing to Suzhou from its Singapore plant starting in the fourth quarter.

* Viscom president Volker Pape shared that AOI for end-of-line remains the standard, with automotive also using AOI for post-paste. A three-machine setup is rare, he said.

Mike Buetow is editor in chief of CIRCUITS ASSEMBLY.

RELATED ARTICLE: Chinese EMS Companies Emerge

While enterprises from Taiwan, Europe and North America dominate the EMS landscape--foreign-run corporations account for some 90% of electronics exports from China, Reed Business reported in November--local vendors are beginning to make noises.

According to Technology Forecasters Inc. (techforecasters.com), Chinese design and manufacturing services are on track to reach $75 billion 2010, up from $38.3 billion last year. Chinese companies are taking advantage of the familiarity with local customers and customs, TFI says. One such example would be 8Telecom (profiled last month in CIRCUITS ASSEMBLY, pg. 4), which parlayed its relationship supplying several major telecom companies with towers and pipes into a budding EMS enterprise.

Some of these companies exhibited in April at Nepcon China. Almost sequestered away from the action on the first floor, a smattering of EMS companies were huddled together on the third floor, including Nanjing Panda Electronics Manufacturing (chinapanda.com.cn), the EMS arm of the billon-dollar Nanjing Panda Electronics Co.; Toec Technology Co. (toec.com), which claims 14 SMT lines and Tyco, JVC, Motorola, Schneider Electronic, Sharp and Fujitsu as customers; and Beijing Brio Technology (briotech.com; see CIRCUITS ASSEMBLY, March 2005). Marketing remains a low-tech endeavor, but these are some of the first to spot that getting their name out is part of the path to growth.

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