Customer Supplied Material: Verifying Boards, Parts and Loss When a customer supplies the boards and the components, the assembly house is working with material it did not buy, cannot replace at short notice and cannot treat as freely as its own stock. The customer supplied material arrangement is common in…
Panel Design and DFM Review Before an SMT Order Starts Two decisions taken before the first board is built have more influence on the cost of an assembly order than anything that happens on the line afterwards: how the individual circuits are arranged on a production panel, and whether the…
Solder Paste Printing and SPI Quality Control Solder paste printing is the operation that decides the ceiling on the quality of an assembly, and it is also the operation that receives the least attention when a product is being planned. Placement and reflow are visible; printing produces a deposit that…
0201 Components and Fine Pitch ICs: Printing, Placement and Inspection A board that carries 0201 passive components and a fine pitch integrated circuit on the same surface is one of the more demanding combinations in ordinary production. The two requirements pull the process in different directions: the tiny passives need…
SMT Capacity: Lines, Floor Space and How an Order Is Scheduled SMT capacity is usually presented as a pair of numbers, a floor area and a count of production lines, and those two numbers tell a buyer almost nothing about whether an order will be delivered on time. A large…
Solution Development from Requirement Definition to Mass Production A solution development project begins with a requirement and ends with a product that can be manufactured, and the distance between those two points is filled with decisions that are much cheaper to take early than late. This introduction describes the route…
PCB Fabrication Capability: Two to Thirty Layers PCB fabrication covers a wider range than most buyers expect when they first place an order. The same shop can cut a two layer prototype on a Friday and laminate a thirty layer backplane over the following fortnight, and the reason those two…
PCB Design Service: From Schematic Capture to a Released Gerber Set A PCB design service is judged on two things that are easy to separate and hard to confuse: whether the resulting board works, and whether the data that leaves the door can be manufactured without a further round of…
SMT Prototype Builds: Data Intake, Stencil and First Article Release A prototype order is small by definition, and that is exactly why it deserves the full process. The purpose of an SMT prototype build is not merely to produce a board that powers up. It is to verify that the…
BGA and QFN Solder Joint Control with X-ray Inspection Ball grid array and quad flat no-lead packages are popular because they fit a large number of connections or a good thermal path into a small footprint. The price of that density is that the main solder joints sit beneath the…












