Issue link: https://iconnect007.uberflip.com/i/1389320
10 SMT007 MAGAZINE I JULY 2021 Feature Interview by the I-Connect007 Editorial Team Eric Camden says nobody knows your board like you do, so it's time for assemblers to start doing their own cleanliness testing and due diligence, and stop relying on outside organi- zations to determine how clean their boards need to be. Nolan Johnson: Could you launch us into this conversation with a quick recap on yourself, your background, and a little about the com- pany you work for? Eric Camden: Officially I'm a lead investigator at Foresite in Kokomo, Indiana. We're a failure analysis and reliability testing laboratory. I've been here 21 years, and I've spent the major- ity of my time going through other people's processes. I'll see a failure, or they're trying to optimize a process in some sort of way on the assembly side of things; we will analyze that as well as going onsite to look at the equipment and processing parameters, and then deter- mine where optimizations can be made. I've spent a lot of my time on improving reliability for our customers in that way, as well as failure analysis. We are an in-depth failure analysis lab with experience from all corners of the indus- try, from component packaging to assembly. Johnson: What seems to be the most urgent or highest visibility issue right now? Camden: For the past few years, miniaturiza- tion has been creeping up and overtaking reli- ability issues when it comes to chemistries, residues, and similar kinds of failure analy- sis projects. Cleanliness is still a big problem; it drives a lot of what we do around here, and when we're looking at the changes in the IPC, what they've done with J-STD-001 cleanliness (where they've taken out the 1.56 target num- ber for acceptability on the ROSE testing), it's been replaced with creating your own objec- tive evidence now. WP-019 explains how the Rhino Group came to these conclusions, and Cleanliness Behind Many Assembly Challenges