Issue link: https://iconnect007.uberflip.com/i/1526114
32 SMT007 MAGAZINE I SEPTEMBER 2024 I assume Mycronic is coordinating with the solder paste manufacturers to ensure the paste and machinery are compatible. Tell me about that process. We have more than 25 qualified solder pastes from different suppliers. You'll find, for exam- ple, unleaded, leaded, water-soluble paste on the list, and we are constantly qualifying addi- tional pastes with our solder paste manufactur- ing partners based on customer request. To ensure the quality of a solder paste deposit, we create cassette models for all qualified sol- der pastes. ese models can then be used by the customer to achieve the best result. We guarantee that they have a certain range in size and volume of the dots, which the jet printing can be fully and repeatably achieve. As jet printing becomes more popular, more customers continue requesting additional pastes for their applications that they would like to have qualified as well. Can you walk me through a typical qualification process? Imagine you are a customer with a paste that is not yet qualified. You talk to your local con- tact at Mycronic, who brings this up to the Mycronic team in HQ, where we will get in touch with the paste supplier and work together on the qualification process. is includes the stability over a minimum of three different solder paste manufacturing batches and a broad variety of testing jobs to ensure the complete jetting range in size and volume. A cassette model providing best parameters for the now qualified paste will become part of the jet printer soware. As an alternative, customers can go for quicker "jettable" or "application specific" qualification. For these approaches, we do the qualification just for the specific customer application or a single manufacturing batch of solder paste.