Technical Library | 2021-11-17 18:53:50.0
The demand for product miniaturization, especially in the handheld device area, continues to challenge the board assembly industry. The desire to incorporate more functionality while making the product smaller continues to push board design to its limit. It is not uncommon to find boards with castle-like components right next to miniature components. This type of board poses a special challenge to the board assemblers as it requires a wide range of paste volume to satisfy both small and large components. One way to address the printing challenge is to use creative stencil design to meet the solder paste requirement for both large and small components. ... The most important attribute of a stencil is its release characteristic. In other words, how well the paste releases from the aperture. The paste release, in turn, depends on the surface characteristics of the aperture wall and stencil foil. The recent introduction of new technology, nano-coating for both stencil and squeegee blades, has drawn the attention of many researchers. As the name implies, nano-coated stencils and blades are made by a conventional method such as laser-cut or electroformed then coated with nano-functional material to alter the surface characteristics. This study will evaluate nano-coated stencils for passive component printing, including 01005.
Technical Library | 2019-09-24 15:41:53.0
This paper focuses on three different coating material groups which were formulated to operate under high thermal stress and are applied at printed circuit board manufacturing level. While used for principally different applications, these coatings have in common that they can be key to a successful thermal management concept especially in e-mobility and lighting applications. The coatings consist of: Specialty (green transparent) liquid photoimageable solder masks (LPiSM) compatible with long-term thermal storage/stress in excess of 150°C. Combined with the appropriate high-temperature base material, and along with a suitable copper pre-treatment, these solder resists are capable of fulfilling higher thermal demands. In this context, long-term storage tests as well as temperature cycling tests were conducted. Moreover, the effect of various Cu pre-treatment methods on the adhesion of the solder masks was examined following 150, 175 and 200°C ageing processes. For this purpose, test panels were conditioned for 2000 hours at the respective temperatures and were submitted to a cross-cut test every 500 h. Within this test set-up, it was found that a multi-level chemical pre-treatment gives significantly better adhesion results, in particular at 175°C and 200°C, compared with a pre-treatment by brush or pumice brush. Also, breakdown voltage as well as tracking resistance were investigated. For an application in LED technology, the light reflectivity and white colour stability of the printed circuit board are of major importance, especially when high-power LEDs are used which can generate larger amounts of heat. For this reason, a very high coverage power and an intense white colour with high reflectivity values are essential for white solder masks. These "ultra-white" and largely non-yellowing LPiSM need to be able to withstand specific thermal loads, especially in combination with high-power LED lighting applications. The topic of thermal performance of coatings for electronics will also be discussed in view of printed heatsink paste (HSP) and thermal interface paste (TIP) coatings which are used for a growing number of applications. They are processed at the printed circuit board manufacturing level for thermal-coupling and heat-spreading purposes in various thermal management-sensitive fields, especially in the automotive and LED lighting industries. Besides giving an overview of the principle functionality, it will be discussed what makes these ceramic-filled epoxy- or silicone-based materials special compared to using "thermal greases" and "thermal pads" for heat dissipation purposes.
