Issue link: https://iconnect007.uberflip.com/i/1166358
SEPTEMBER 2019 I PCB007 MAGAZINE 21 Operating in an IPC Standards Environment Mark Twain is quoted as saying, "Those who respect the law and love sausage should watch neither being made." For those of us operating in (or working with) the North American print- ed circuit business, you'll undoubtedly have at least some involvement with IPC standards. In printed circuits, much of the world—and near- ly all of North America—has settled on con- sensus-based standards, as painful, noisy, con- tentious, and imperfect as that process may be. Current standards are generated by a pro- cess that has evolved over the past 60+ years managed by IPC as the "lingua franca" of the business. IPC standards are not universal (with a nod to the Interna - tional Electrotechnical Commission [IEC] and others), but they are recognized everywhere. There are literally hundreds of IPC stan- dards covering general (e.g., printed board ac- ceptability) to very spe- cific applications (e.g., specifications on cop- per-invar-copper core structures), both his- toric and current. One of your first tasks (if not already spelled out for you by your cus- tomer) is determining which are applicable. A snapshot of some of the possible applicable standards is shown in Figure 1. An extremely over- simplified view (design layout through outgo- ing quality control) of a simple multilayer PCB could involve as few as the following (probably not, but let's keep it simple for this discussion): • Design/Layout: Netlist/interconnect routing, IPC-2221, IPC-2222 • Methods Engineering: Process sequence, in-process test, IPC-2222, IPC-6012 • Process Engineering: Process control capable of meeting IPC-6012 • Quality: Customer documentation, IPC-6012, IPC-A-600 Figure 1: IPC standards tree.