Technical Library | 2020-09-30 19:26:45.0
Introduction •Market trend: Smaller, more efficient, more powerful, run faster •ICs and other sophisticated electronic components typically operate efficiently only under a certain range of temperatures •Operational temperatures must be kept within a suitable range • Excessive heat can damage performance and can even cause system failure
Technical Library | 2014-03-06 19:04:07.0
Over the last few years, there has been an increase in the rate of Head-in-Pillow component soldering defects which interrupts the merger of the BGA/CSP component solder spheres with the molten solder paste during reflow. The issue has occurred across a broad segment of industries including consumer, telecom and military. There are many reasons for this issue such as warpage issues of the component or board, ball co-planarity issues for BGA/CSP components and non-wetting of the component based on contamination or excessive oxidation of the component coating. The issue has been found to occur not only on lead-free soldered assemblies where the increased soldering temperatures may give rise to increase component/board warpage but also on tin-lead soldered assemblies.
Technical Library | 2014-08-14 17:58:41.0
High reliability applications for high performance computing, military, medical and industrial applications are driving electronics packaging advancements toward increased functionality with decreasing degrees of size, weight and power (SWaP) The substrate technology selected for the electronics package is a key enabling technology towards achieving SWaP. Standard printed circuit boards (PWBs) utilize dielectric materials containing glass cloth, which can limit circuit density and performance, as well as inhibit the ability to achieve reliable assemblies with bare semiconductor die components. Ceramic substrates often used in lieu of PWBs for chip packaging have disadvantages of weight, marginal electrical performance and reliability as compared to organic technologies. Alternative materials including thin, particle-containing organic substrates, liquid crystal polymer (LCP) and microflex enable SWaP, while overcoming the limitations of PWBs and ceramic. This paper will discuss the use of these alternative organic substrate materials to achieve extreme electronics miniaturization with outstanding electrical performance and high reliability. The effect of substrate type on chip-package interaction and resulting reliability will be discussed. Microflex assemblies to achieve extreme miniaturization and atypical form factors driven by implantable and in vivo medical applications are also shown.
Technical Library | 2018-07-18 16:28:26.0
Reduction of first pass defects in the SMT assembly process minimizes cost, assembly time and improves reliability. These three areas, cost, delivery and reliability determine manufacturing yields and are key in maintaining a successful and profitable assembly process. It is commonly accepted that the solder paste printing process causes the highest percentage of yield challenges in the SMT assembly process. As form factor continues to get smaller, the challenge to obtain 100% yield becomes more difficult.This paper will identify defects affecting SMT yields in the printing process and discuss their Root Cause. Outer layer copper weight and surface treatment will also be addressed as to their effect on printability. Experiments using leadless and emerging components will be studied and root cause analysis will be presented
Technical Library | 2022-09-25 20:03:37.0
Cracking remains the major reason of failures in multilayer ceramic capacitors (MLCCs) used in space electronics. Due to a tight quality control of space-grade components, the probability that as manufactured capacitors have cracks is relatively low, and cracking is often occurs during assembly, handling and the following testing of the systems. Majority of capacitors with cracks are revealed during the integration and testing period, but although extremely rarely, defective parts remain undetected and result in failures during the mission. Manual soldering and rework that are often used during low volume production of circuit boards for space aggravate this situation. Although failures of MLCCs are often attributed to the post-manufacturing stresses, in many cases they are due to a combination of certain deviations in the manufacturing processes that result in hidden defects in the parts and excessive stresses during assembly and use. This report gives an overview of design, manufacturing and testing processes of MLCCs focusing on elements related to cracking problems. The existing and new screening and qualification procedures and techniques are briefly described and assessed by their effectiveness in revealing cracks. The capability of different test methods to simulate stresses resulting in cracking, mechanisms of failures in capacitors with cracks, and possible methods of selecting capacitors the most robust to manual soldering stresses are discussed.
Technical Library | 2015-12-31 15:19:28.0
Today's consumer electronic product are characterized by miniatuization, portability and light weight with high performance, especially for 3G mobile products. In the future more fine pitch CSPs (0.4mm) component will be required. However, the product reliability has been a big challenge with the fine pitch CSP. Firstly, the fine pitch CSPs are with smaller solder balls of 0.25mm diameter or even smaller. The small solder ball and pad size do weaken the solder connection and the adhesion of the pad and substrate, thus the pad will peel off easily from the PCB substrate. In addition, miniature solder joint reduce the strength during mechanical vibration, thermal shock, fatigue failure, etc. Secondly, applying sufficient solder paste evenly on the small pad of the CSP is difficult because stencil opening is only 0.25mm or less. This issue can be solved using the high end type of stencil such as Electroforming which will increase the cost.
Technical Library | 2020-03-04 23:53:17.0
Critical to maintaining quality control in high-throughput screening is the need for constant monitoring of liquid-dispensing fidelity. Traditional methods involve operator intervention with gravimetric analysis to monitor the gross accuracy of full plate dispenses, visual verification of contents, or dedicated weigh stations on screening platforms that introduce potential bottlenecks and increase the plate-processing cycle time. We present a unique solution using open-source hardware, software, and 3D printing to automate dispenser accuracy determination by providing real-time dispense weight measurements via a network-connected precision balance. This system uses an Arduino microcontroller to connect a precision balance to a local network. By integrating the precision balance as an Internet of Things (IoT) device, it gains the ability to provide real-time gravimetric summaries of dispensing, generate timely alerts when problems are detected, and capture historical dispensing data for future analysis. All collected data can then be accessed via a web interface for reviewing alerts and dispensing information in real time or remotely for timely intervention of dispense errors. The development of this system also leveraged 3D printing to rapidly prototype sensor brackets, mounting solutions, and component enclosures.
Technical Library | 2020-10-08 01:01:01.0
Flexible hybrid electronics (FHE) is emerging as a promising solution to combine the benefits of printed electronics and silicon technology. FHE has many high-impact potential areas, such as wearable applications, health monitoring, and soft robotics, due to its physical advantages, which include light weight, low cost and the ability conform to different shapes. However, physical deformations in the field can lead to significant testing and validation challenges. For example, designers must ensure that FHE devices continue to meet their specs even when the components experience stress due to bending. Hence, physical deformation, which is hard to emulate, has to be part of the test procedures for FHE devices. This paper is the first to analyze stress experience at different parts of FHE devices under different bending conditions. We develop a novel methodology to maximize the test coverage with minimum number of text vectors with the help of a mixed integer linear programming formulation. We validate the proposed approach using an FHE prototype and COMSOL Multiphysics simulations
Technical Library | 2021-06-07 19:06:32.0
The technological growth of the last decades has brought many improvements in daily life, but also concerns on how to deal with electronic waste. Electrical and electronic equipment waste is the fastest-growing rate in the industrialized world. One of the elements of electronic equipment is the printed circuit board (PCB) and almost every electronic equipment has a PCB inside it. While waste PCB (WPCB) recycling may result in the recovery of potentially precious materials and the reuse of some components, it is a challenging task because its composition diversity requires a cautious pre-processing stage to achieve optimal recycling outcomes. Our research focused on proposing a method to evaluate the economic feasibility of recycling integrated circuits (ICs) from WPCB. The proposed method can help decide whether to dismantle a separate WPCB before the physical or mechanical recycling process and consists of estimating the IC area from a WPCB, calculating the IC's weight using surface density, and estimating how much metal can be recovered by recycling those ICs. To estimate the IC area in a WPCB, we used a state-of-the-art object detection deep learning model (YOLO) and the PCB DSLR image dataset to detect the WPCB's ICs. Regarding IC detection, the best result was obtained with the partitioned analysis of each image through a sliding window, thus creating new images of smaller dimensions, reaching 86.77% mAP. As a final result, we estimate that the Deep PCB Dataset has a total of 1079.18 g of ICs, from which it would be possible to recover at least 909.94 g of metals and silicon elements from all WPCBs' ICs. Since there is a high variability in the compositions of WPCBs, it is possible to calculate the gross income for each WPCB and use it as a decision criterion for the type of pre-processing.
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