Issue link: https://iconnect007.uberflip.com/i/594816
96 SMT Magazine • November 2015 zation and the opportunity to reduce produc- tion lot-sizes and thus levels of working capital. It opens the way for the full application of lean manufacturing in the supply-chain sense. Summary This paper describes a technological imple- mentation of component libraries, classifica- tion systems, and rules that support DFA and as- sembly-line setup portability. The development has taken time because of a number of factors related to investment, time to gather and verify industry requirements, and the time required to establish library content of sufficient critical mass to meet the needs of the industry in gen- eral (tens of millions of parts). To be a working solution, multiple pieces of a puzzle had to be developed in parallel, including: 1. A globally available library that meets the requirements for DFA analysis and assembly line machines, loaded with content to match the many millions of parts in use by the design and manufacturing organizations. 2. A component classification system that meets the needs of DFA analysis. 3. A set of rules for DFA analysis, matched to the classification system, the values for which can be maintained by process engineers. 4. A component classification system that meets the needs of PCB assembly-line machine- library generation 5. A set of rules for machine-level library generation that matches the classification sys- tem, which can be extended as new machines and component types emerge. 6. The software infrastructure and tools to realize the solution in the hands of PCB design- ers and manufacturers in thousands of locations worldwide, together with its on-going mainte- nance and upgrading according to developing industry processes and requirements. The forward roadmap is to continue the de- velopment of all the aspects described above, in parallel and according to industry require- ments, and also to support additional PCB-re- lated engineering processes that can take ad- vantage of the same source library content so as to further reduce the per-task cost. SmT Pat mcGoff is a market development manager at Mentor graphics corp. researchers at the Department of energy's oak ridge national laboratory (ornl) have found a way to manufacture bulk heterojunction solar cell films (bHJs) more easily: by using a simple solvent that makes thermal annealing a thing of the past. In a collaboration between orNl's Spallation Neutron Source (SNS) and the center for Nanophase Materials Sciences (cNMS), postdoctoral researcher nuradhika Herath led a team of neutron and materials scientists in a study of the morphology, or structure, of bHJs. The researchers compared thermal annealing with a method that adds a small amount of sol - vent that aids in dissolving the fullerenes within the blend and helps to make the film's structure more uniform. using solvent additives to optimize the morphology of bHJ films could negate the need to invest more into a less effective process. "optimization of photovoltaic properties pro- vides information to manu- facture solar cells with fully controlled morphology and device performance," Herath said. "These findings will aid in developing 'ideal' photo- voltaics, which gets us one step closer to producing com- mercialized devices." Solvents Save Steps in Solar Cell Manufacturing STreAmLINING PCb ASSembLy AND TeST NPI WITH SHAreD ComPoNeNT LIbrArIeS arTIcLe