Selective soldering has found a wide application with the increasing use of SMT technology, which has significantly changed the ratio on electronic boards between surface mounted components, soldered by reflow, compared to traditional through hole (TH) insertion components, which are usually not soldered by reflow.
Automated selective soldering was born to help in those cases where neither wave soldering nor  soldering by reflow (combined with the pin-in-paste technique) can be applied, and as an alternative to hand-soldering which has issues in terms of repeatability, is too subjective and in many instances cannot provide the targeted levels of  throughput and consequently is not cost effective.

Seica’s solution for automating the selective soldering process is the Firefly, the most complete, high-performance laser-based selective soldering system currently available. Laser-based soldering offers the capability to exploit a high energy beam that can be focused exclusively on the solder joint, without involving the board substrate and the surrounding components (even with the high temperatures required for  lead-free alloys). This offers a number of advantages, including: accessibility for soldering in very small places, low maintenance costs, fast setup (the type of soldering alloy can be changed in just a few minutes), automatic program generation from CAD data, direct control and verification of the thermal profile for every single solder joint. The Firefly is also an eco-friendly soldering solution, with low energy consumption and virtually no process residuals.
 

 Seica currently proposes two, completely automated in-line solutions:
- Bottom-side laser selective soldering  (typical for boards) (Filefly FB60)
- Top-side laser selective soldering (typical for modules)  (Filefly FT60)