SMT007 Magazine

SMT007-May2020

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40 SMT007 MAGAZINE I MAY 2020 body," and I can understand why other com- panies would not want the Henkel logo in their lab. We talked to SMTA and renamed it the SMTA board, but it is sold through Practi- cal Components. SMTA gets a royalty for every board and kit they sell, and that money goes toward the SMTA education funds. It's a win- win all the way around. I'm particularly interested in this because I've seen so many different test vehicles. Every large contract shop has a different test vehicle that they've done themselves, and a lot of the smaller shops don't, so they use ones that they can buy online through Practical. Nothing was really modern, and there were no common denominators between them. In other words, I could read a study by Flex and a study by Jabil, but because they're not using the same test vehicles and the same component footprints, I can't compare the data apples to apples. As we get more and more users on board with this, we'll have a lot more of good published data that we can compare. On the supplier side, I would like to see everybody testing their solder paste on the same test vehicle using the same test method because it will make deciphering supplier data much easier and more straightforward. You might recall when we started checking place- ment rates with an IPC standard because every supplier had its own tests and metrics. Right now, we have no real standards for print qual- ity that we can adhere to. Everybody tests and publishes their own data on the honor system. Shea: Soldering. I started out almost 30 years ago wave soldering. I love making solder joints. We do a lot more SMT than wave sol- dering these days, but I particularly enjoy sten- cil printing because it merges two of my favor- ite fields: automation and material science. Johnson: It seems to me like a test vehicle such as this should have been around a lot earlier. How did this get started? What caused that to happen now? Shea: What caused it to happen now is that it was an internal test vehicle with Henkel Elec- tronic Materials, and it had a lot of good fea- tures on it, so some of their customers were requesting to use it themselves. At that point, Henkel brought me in, we did a first run of it, and we realized we needed to add some intel- ligence. We had a lot of empty real estate on the board so we could add more features, and we needed to reduce the cost to make it fea- sible for the general public. We went through that exercise. This was my favorite project ever and prob- ably the capstone of my career. As we respun this board and added the intelligence, more features, and the embedded DOEs, I drew on things I learned at every job I've had in the last 30 years. This was a great project for me. We introduced revision 1, and it had the Henkel logo on it, and the industry wasn't as accepting as I would've hoped. We thought, "We need to make this a test vehicle for every- The Miniaturization Test Vehicle board, top and bottom.

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