Laminate Moisture Absorption and Its Effects on Boards Every organic laminate absorbs water from the air, and the amount it holds changes the properties that the design depends on. The board grows slightly, its dielectric behaviour shifts, its glass transition temperature falls and its ability to survive a thermal cycle…

Yield Analytics in PCB Manufacturing Yield data analytics is the work of turning a stream of production records into decisions. Most shops already collect the data they need, in travellers, inspection results and test reports, and most of it is never examined beyond the summary figure that appears in a…

Package Substrate Selection For IC Assembly A package substrate is the small high density board inside an integrated circuit package that carries the die on one side and the solder balls on the other. It is a printed circuit board in every respect except scale: its lines are a few…

PCB Stiffener Selection And Bonding A stiffener is a piece of rigid material bonded to a thin or flexible board to control its shape, to support a connector or a component, and to keep the assembly flat enough for the process and for the product. It is common on flex…

Equipment Uptime in PCB Manufacturing Equipment uptime is the share of the planned production time during which a machine is available to produce, and it is one of the few figures in a board shop that translates directly into delivery performance. A machine that is unavailable cannot make boards, and…

Spare Parts Management for PCB Production Spare parts management decides how long a machine stays down. Every board shop has a store room full of parts that are never used and a short list of parts whose absence stops the line, and the difference between the two is rarely reflected…

Panelization: Preparation, Placement and Process Control A panel is the format in which boards are fabricated and assembled. The panel carries several boards, a border that the machine can grip, tooling holes that locate it, fiducials that the placement machine uses to find it, and the tabs or score lines…

Conformal Coating Application Methods Compared A conformal coating is a thin polymer film applied over an assembled board to protect it from moisture, contamination and the mechanical effects of the environment. The film itself is chosen for its chemistry, but the way it is applied determines whether it actually covers…

Overall Equipment Effectiveness in PCB Manufacturing Overall equipment effectiveness is a single figure built from three ratios, and its value lies in the way it forces a shop to look at losses it would otherwise treat separately. The three parts are availability, which measures the time the equipment was able…

Planned Maintenance in PCB Manufacturing Planned maintenance is the work done on equipment before it fails, scheduled at a time that suits production rather than at a time that suits the failure. A board shop depends on a small number of expensive, highly loaded machines, and the loss from an…