Common Ball Grid Array Failures and How to Avoid Them
The BGA ball-mount process may seem uninteresting and trivial at first glance. However, the soldering steps are complex and can lead to problematic fa...
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Belated Happy Birthday RoHS
Folks, Happy Birthday RoHS! A milestone occurred, and it seemed to be missed: RoHS celebrated its 15th birthday on July 1st! For those new to electron...
Calculating Total Downtime
Folks, Downtime calculations can be a bit confusing. Most people would assume that if a line has 4 machines and they are each down for 5% of the time...
The 20 Questions Game
Do we really understand the things that we do at our work places if we are unable to explain them in simple terms to our own child? What if we ca...
Hypothesis and Confidence Interval Calculations for Cp and Cpks
Folks, I am re-posting an updated blog post on Cp and Cpk calculations with Excel®, as I have improved the Excel® spreadsheet. If you wou...
Gallium: An Interesting, Versatile Material
Folks, It is natural to expect that Indium Corporation is the premiere supplier of indium metal, solder pastes, preforms, compounds, and chemistry sol...
Automated Soldering Methods: What’s the Difference Between Robotic Soldering and Laser Soldering?
Laser soldering is making its way into the market and onto electronics assembly lines. What's the difference between this method and iron-tip robo...
Answers to SMT Quiz
A few weeks ago, I posted an SMT quiz on my blog. We received 178 responses, which seemed very good to me. Working with my Indium Corpo...
Bringing Solder Paste Reliability to E-Mobility
The next generation of vehicles have power inverters and battery management systems that demand incredible reliability......
Solder in Medical Devices: That Solder’s Going Where?
Cardiac pacemakers generally use 99.99% Au preforms as the solder material in the assembly. Pure gold is highly pure, inert, biocompatible, has a high...
Take the SMT Quiz and Perhaps Win a Prize
Folks: Do you know how much copper is in SAC305 solder? What about the most typical solder paste powder diameter? These questions, and eight others, a...
Solution to Moore's Law
Folks, In a recent post, I discussed Moore’s Law. I challenged readers to solve for "a" and "b", from the equation a*2^(b*(y...