Flying Probe Test on a Portable Oscilloscope Acquisition Board A portable oscilloscope acquisition board carries converters, a processor, memory, analog switches, operational amplifiers and input protection, and the power check that follows assembly says very little about any of them. A board can start normally while one supply net, one…

Double-Sided SMT Assembly for a Smart Thermostat Board A thermostat board carries the controller, the temperature sensing interface, the display connector, the power management devices and the relay driver circuit, and it is usually built as a two sided assembly. The board that is populated first passes through the reflow…

Consumer Electronics SMT Assembly for Smart Hardware and Appliances Consumer products change quickly, their volumes move up and down, and the boards inside them keep shrinking. A manufacturer that can place a chip resistor measuring four hundred micrometres and then change the line over to a different product the same…

PCB Shipment Inspection to the IPC-A-600 Class 3 Standard A customer who receives bare boards has no way to inspect the inside of a plated hole, and very little way to judge a surface finish beyond its appearance. That is why the acceptance standard has to be agreed before the…

Zero Drift and Weighing Test on a Scale Main Board A scale main board that reads correctly when it leaves the line can drift in the field for reasons that have nothing to do with the conversion chip. A slowly wandering zero or a display that keeps jumping may come…

RS485 Testing on a Smart Meter Communication Board A smart meter communication board can power up correctly and still fail in the field, because the behaviour that matters is only visible under repeated traffic. A board may answer the first request after a cold start and then stop, lose an…

QFN Assembly and X-ray Inspection on a Charging Module Board A charging module control board combines power management, sampling, communication and protection, and it usually carries both bottom terminated devices and a dense population of small passives. On a QFN assembly the visible fillets on the outer leads prove very…

PoE Board Assembly: What the First Article Has to Cover A security camera receives both data and power over one ethernet cable, and the board that makes that possible carries a controller, protection devices, a DC-DC supply and the network interface. The surface mount components on that board are directly…

BGA Assembly on a Vision Control Board: What the First Article Must Cover A machine vision control board carries a ball grid array processor, memory, clock devices, power regulators and one or more high-speed camera connectors. Assembling it concentrates several problems into one product: the joints under the BGA cannot…

Double-Sided Assembly in SMT: Order, Support and Reflow Control A battery monitoring board for an energy storage system carries several sampling harnesses, a long outline, and components on both faces. Building it is not a matter of running the same process twice. The first side has already been through reflow…