Articles/Papers
Best Practices Reflow Profiling for Lead-Free SMT Assembly
Best Practices Reflow Profiling for Lead-Free SMT Assembly Indium Corporation Tech Paper Authored by: Ed Briggs and Ronald C. Lasky, Ph.D.,PE ABSTRACT The combination of higher lead-free process temperatures, smaller print deposits, and temperature restraints on electrical components has created…
Process Guidelines to Ensure Optimal SMT Electronics Assembly
Indium Corporation Tech Paper Authored by: Ed Briggs and Ronald C. Lasky, PhD, PE. Abstract The continuing miniaturization of personal electronics devices, such as mobile phones, personal music devices, and personal computing devices has driven the need for increasingly smaller…
Evaluating the Accuracy of a Non-Destructive Thermocouple Attach Method for Area-Array Package Profiling
Evaluating the Accuracy of a Non-Destructive Thermocouple Attach Method for Area-Array Package Profiling Tim Grove and Dr. S. Manian Ramkumar, Center for Electronics Manufacturing and Assembly, Rochester Institute of Technology, Rochester, NY Brian O’Leary, KIC, San Diego Introduction The oven…
Reducing Power Consumption by Selecting Optimal Oven Recipes
By Abhinav Ajmera, Sreekanth Varma Penmatsa and Prof. S. Manian Ramkumar for KIC The goal of this article is to study the efficiency of the KIC 2000’s Auto-Focus Power option to select an optimal oven recipe for reduced power consumption…
Staying Power in the Fiercely Competitive EMS Business
Bjorn Dahle, President, KIC With a level playing field in terms of access to talent, technology, knowhow, infrastructure, and financial resources, how can an EMS company build a successful business year after year, decade after decade? There may not be…
Instant Reflow Oven Changeover in a World of Short Production Runs
MB Allen, Product Manager, KIC A clear industry trend now spreading beyond the traditional North American and European markets is characterized by short production runs and frequent production line changeover. Improved technologies for line balancing, production planning, smart feeders, MES…
Interview with Luis Bresil of ZF TRW
by SMT Today Editor February 2016 ZF TRW is a primary developer and producer of active and passive safety systems and serves all major vehicle manufacturers worldwide with an established footprint that includes facilities in more than 20 countries. It…
Ultimately, What is Job # 1 for a Reflow Oven? Think about It!
Reflow ovens and wave solder machines come in a huge variety of flavors and price points. The spec sheets for these machines tell the story of impressive features and capabilities such as flux management, gas flow management, static pressure control,…
The Case for Automatic Profiling: Why It Outperforms Manual Profiling
by Bjorn Dahle, President, KIC The electronics assembly industry is constantly evolving to manufacture requested quality while driving down cost. One area of recent focus is perhaps one of the last manual tasks in the production line, namely thermal profiling.…
Reflow in Today’s High-Mix / High-Volume Production Environment
By Bjorn Dahle, President, KIC Many printed-circuit-board production lines working in surface-mount-technology (SMT) markets in the US and Europe can be described as high-mix, low-to-medium volume lines. Many of these lines experience more downtime than production time, creating a serious…
Machine Monitoring or Process Monitoring?
By Bjorn Dahle, President, KIC, San Diego, CA In a world of more and more data, we need to choose what to monitor. Do we focus monitoring around a particular machine or do we monitor a process regardless of machine…
Lead-Free: New Problems – New Solutions
Over the past several decades the electronics assembly industry has perfected efficient and high quality manufacturing of leaded assemblies. Today we are faced with disruptive changes required by the production of Lead-Free electronics. Manufacturers are discovering that their old,…