When the printed wiring or circuit board was first created in the 1940s, it was done so in part to reduce the increasing complexity of attempting to wire circuits manually. The PCB fulfilled its role perfectly and was an overwhelming success, since becoming a multi-billion dollar industry. However, as PCBs became more prevalent and advanced, it also became difficult to quickly and accurately produce populated circuit boards in large quantities. This need to populate the tens to hundreds of thousands of circuit boards lead to the advent of pick and place machines, an automated method of placing a large quantity of components on boards extremely quickly. While simple in concept, the pick and place is an amazingly complex and precise machine. The variety of situations in which the pick and place is used has created an interesting smorgasbord of styles for the pick and place machine, though all operate according to a set of basic principles are generally unchanging.
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