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...
Dr. Ron Lasky's Blog
Still Much Hype Around AI and Industry 4.0
Folks, I recently read an article about “Lighthouse Factories” which appear to be implementations of Industry 4.0. It is encouraging that ...
Tin: The Foundation Metal of Soldering
Folks, The vast majority of solders used in electronic assembly have, as their base metal, tin. There are some specialty gold solders, like gold-co...
Checking Moore’s Law
Folks, Moore’s Law was developed by Gordon Moore in 1965. It predicted that the number of transistors in integrate circuits would double approxi...
SMT Assembly is an Optimization Process
Folks, SMT assembly is an optimization process. There is no single stencil printing process for all PWB designs. The stencil printing parameters of st...
Is Quantum Computing Emerging to Solve Practical Problems?
Folks, I read with interest Zohair Mehkri’s SMTAI 2020 paper entitled How Quantum Computing (QC) will Revolutionize Electronics Manufacturing. I...
The Rule of 72
The Rule of 72 Four years ago, the big boss, 6'6" tall, 350 pound Mac Savage, said that the goal for the sales of a new product was at least...
The Miracle of Soldering
Folks, Imagine you are Guglielmo Marconi, and you opened the first radio factory in Chelmsford England in 1912. Using Lee De Forest’s 1906...
AI and Autonomous Vehicle Challenges: Common Sense, Flexibility, Dexterity, and Situational Awareness
Folks, I have been following advances in artificial intelligence (AI) and autonomous vehicles (AV) for some time now. At first, I was a cautious, then...
Pareto Chart: Crucial in a Continuous Improvement Plan
Folks, The Pareto Chart is a simple way to plot failure data that gives priority to the failure modes with the highest number of fails. ...
A Simple Explanation of Why the Commonly Used Equation for Alloy Density is Wrong
It still surprises me that my most popular blog topic in the 15 years (yikes!) that I have been blogging is how to calculate solder alloy density havi...