PCB Drill Bit Environment: A Practical Manufacturing Guide Electronics manufacturing has become a discipline of small details. Solder paste volumes, placement accuracy, temperature profiles and inspection limits all add up to the final result. This guide looks at PCB drill bit environment from the perspective of a PCBA factory floor,…

Solder Mask Adhesion: 4 Checks After Curing Solder mask adhesion is the bond between the cured coating and the copper or laminate beneath it, and it is asked to survive more than most coatings. It sees flux, cleaning chemistry, thermal cycling and mechanical handling, all after the panel has left…

Flux Content in Solder Paste: 6 Rules for Checking It Flux content is the proportion of a solder paste that is not metal, and it is the number that decides how the paste behaves on the stencil, how it wets the pad and how much residue it leaves behind. The…

Hole Wall Pull-Away: Why Plated Barrels Separate Hole wall pull-away is a separation between the copper of a plated through hole barrel and the resin wall it was plated onto. The gap may be a few micrometres or more than twenty, and it usually appears after a thermal excursion rather…

Etchback Control for Reliable Plated Through Holes Etchback is the deliberate removal of resin from the wall of a drilled hole so that the copper of the inner layers protrudes slightly into the hole. Plating then wraps around that exposed copper, which produces a connection with more contact area than…

PCB Statement of Work Data: What Matters on the Production Line Buyers and engineers often focus on the finished product and forget the production line behind it. In practice, most field failures can be traced back to process decisions made during assembly. Understanding PCB statement of work data gives you…

Flux Acid Value Control: 7 Rules for Consistent Soldering Acid value is a laboratory number that describes how much acidic material is present in a flux, expressed as the amount of alkali needed to neutralise a known weight of it. It is one of the few measurements that predicts how…

Plating Rack Maintenance for PCB Plating Lines: 7 Rules Every panel in an electroplating line is held by a rack or a jig, and that rack is part of the electrical circuit. The current enters through the rack contacts, passes through the panel and leaves at the other end. Any…

Flux Spitting in Wave Soldering: Causes and Controls Flux spitting is the ejection of flux droplets from the applicator that land on areas of the board where they were not intended. The droplets appear as isolated spots, sometimes with a dark ring, and they are usually seen on the top…

Microvoids in Plated Copper: Detection and Root Causes A microvoid is a small cavity inside plated copper, typically a few micrometres across and often located where the barrel meets the surface pad or an inner layer connection. It is inside the copper rather than between the copper and the resin,…