Technical Library | 2019-12-05 13:30:46.0
Conformal coatings are regularly employed to protect the surface of a soldered printed circuit board assembly from moisture, chemicals in the PCBA's service environment, and foreign objects or debris. Conformal coatings are nonconductive and therefore cannot be placed on any location where electrical contact will be required, such as connector pins, test points, and sockets. Conformal coatings are also not permitted on any mechanical interface location, such as mounting holes or brackets, to assure the proper fit between items in the final assembly. In order to apply conformal coatings to an assembly and comply with the restrictions on keep-out areas, masking is employed to protect those surfaces.
Technical Library | 2022-08-08 15:06:06.0
Selective soldering has evolved to become a standard production process within the electronics assembly industry, and now accommodates a wide variety of through-hole component formats in numerous applications. Most through-hole components can be easily soldered with the selective soldering process without difficulty however some types of challenging components require additional attention to ensure that optimum quality is maintained. Several high thermal mass components can place demands on the selective soldering process, while the use of specialized solder fixtures, or solder pallets, often places additional thermal demand on the preheating process. Fine-pitch through-hole components and connectors place a different set of demands on the selective soldering process and typically require special attention to lead projection and traverse speed to minimize bridging between adjacent pins. Dual in-line memory module (DIMM) connectors, compact peripheral component interface (cPCI) connectors, coax connectors and other high thermal mass components as well as fine-pitch microconnectors, can present challenges when soldered into backplanes or multilayer printed circuit board assemblies. Adding to this challenge, compact peripheral component interface connectors can present additional solderability issues because of their beryllium copper base metal pins. Key Terms: Selective soldering, drop-jet fluxing, sustained preheating, flux migration, adjacent clearance, lead-to-hole aspect ratio, lead projection, thermal reliefs, gold embrittlement, solderability testing.
Technical Library | 2019-06-06 00:19:02.0
More and more people and things are using electronic devices to communicate. Subsequently, many electronic products, in particular mobile base stations and core network nodes, need to handle enormous amounts of data per second. One important link in this communication chain is high speed pressfit connectors that are often used to connect mother boards and back planes in core network nodes. These new high speed pressfit connectors have several hundreds of thin, short and weak pins that are prone to damage. Small variations in via hole dimensions or hole plating thickness affect the connections; if the holes are too small, the pins may be bentor permanently deformed and if the holes are too large they will not form gas tight connections.The goal of this project was to understand how rework of these new high speed pressfit connectors affects connection strengths, hole wall deformations and plating cracks.
Technical Library | 2013-03-07 18:25:36.0
The market for high-layer-count printed circuit boards (PCB) containing blind and buried vias was once relatively small, and focused on specialized applications in the military and high end computing. The demand for these types of PCBs today is being driven by an increasing number of commercial applications in the telecommunications and semiconductor test market segments. These applications typically require high-aspect-ratio plated-through-holes (PTHs) and blind and buried vias in order to meet the applications interconnect density requirements. Blind and buried vias and high aspect ratio PTHs continue to present manufacturing challenges and frequently are the limiting features to achieving high fabrication yield... First published in the 2012 IPC APEX EXPO technical conference proceedings
Technical Library | 2019-07-17 17:56:34.0
The increased demand for electronic devices in recent years has led to an extensive research in the field to meet the requirements of the industry. Electrolytic copper has been an important technology in the fabrication of PCBs and semiconductors. Aqueous sulfuric acid baths are explored for filling or building up with copper structures like blind micro vias (BMV), trenches, through holes (TH), and pillar bumps. As circuit miniaturization continues, developing a process that simultaneously fills vias and plates TH with various sizes and aspect ratios, while minimizing the surface copper thickness is critical. Filling BMV and plating TH at the same time, presents great difficulties for the PCB manufactures. The conventional copper plating processes that provide good via fill and leveling of the deposit tend to worsen the throwing power (TP) of the electroplating bath. TP is defined as the ratio of the deposit copper thickness in the center of the through hole to its thickness at the surface. In this paper an optimization of recently developed innovative, one step acid copper plating technology for filling vias with a minimal surface thickness and plating through holes is presented.
Technical Library | 2020-07-15 18:29:34.0
In the early 2000s the first fine-pitch ball grid array devices became popular with designers looking to pack as much horsepower into as small a space as possible. "Smaller is better" became the rule and with that the mechanical drilling world became severely impacted by available drill bit sizes, aspect ratios, and plating methodologies. First of all, the diameter of the drill needed to be in the 0.006" or smaller range due to the reduction of pad size and spacing pitch. Secondly, the aspect ratio (depth to diameter) became limited by drill flute length, positional accuracy, rigidity of the tools (to prevent breakage), and the throwing power of acid copper plating systems. And lastly, the plating needed to close up the hole as much as possible, which led to problems with voiding, incomplete fill, and gas/solution entrapment.
Technical Library | 2020-05-07 03:46:27.0
The selective soldering process has evolved to become a standard production process within the electronics assembly industry, and now accommodates a wide variety of through-hole component formats in numerous applications. Most through-hole components can be easily soldered with the selective soldering process without difficulty, however some types of challenging components require additional attention to ensure optimum quality control is maintained. Several high thermal mass components can place demands on the selective soldering process, while the use of specialized solder fixtures and/or pallets often places an additional thermal demand on the preheating process. Fine-pitch through-hole components and connectors place a different set of demands on the selective soldering process and typically require special attention to lead projection and traverse speed to minimize bridging between adjacent pins. Dual in-line memory module (DIMM) connectors, compact peripheral component interface (cPCI) connectors, coax connectors and other high thermal mass components as well as fine-pitch microconnectors,can present challenges when soldered into backplanes or multilayer printed circuit board assemblies. Adding to this challenge, compact peripheral component interface connectors can present additional solderability issues due to their beryllium copper termination pins.
Technical Library | 2013-08-15 13:12:11.0
An automated visual PCB inspection is an approach used to counter difficulties occurred in human’s manual inspection that can eliminates subjective aspects and then provides fast, quantitative, and dimensional assessments. In this study, referential approach has been implemented on template and defective PCB images to detect numerous defects on bare PCBs before etching process, since etching usually contributes most destructive defects found on PCBs. The PCB inspection system is then improved by incorporating a geometrical image registration, minimum thresholding technique and median filtering in order to solve alignment and uneven illumination problem. Finally, defect classification operation is employed in order to identify the source for six types of defects namely, missing hole, pin hole, underetch, short-circuit, mousebite, and open-circuit.
Technical Library | 2007-09-27 16:18:15.0
Considerable interest exists in the process known as the pinin- paste, or the Alternative Assembly and Reflow Technology (AART) process. The AART process allows for the simultaneous reflow of both odd-form and through hole devices as well as surface mount components. This process has several advantages over the typical mixed technology process sequence that includes wave soldering and/or hand soldering, often in addition to reflow soldering.
Technical Library | 2008-03-18 12:36:31.0
This paper examines the construction of a notebook mainboard with more than 2000 components and no wave soldering required. The board contains standard SMD, chipset BGAs, connectors, through hole components and odd forms placed using full automation and soldered after two reflow cycles under critical process parameters. However, state of the art technology does not help if the process parameters are not set carefully. Can all complex BGAs, THTs and even screws be soldered on a single stencil? What will help us overcome bridging, insufficient solder and thombstoning issues? This paper will demonstrate the placement of all odd shape components using pin-in-paste stencil design and full completion of the motherboard after two reflow cycles.
