How important is R & D to PCBA manufacturing companies?
What is a PCB circuit board, PCBA circuit board, how do the two differ?
12/11/2019The company’s perspective is to purchase electronic components to make PCBA itself, or to directly find a company to do PCBA?
12/12/2019New developments require more complex, larger PCBA and tighter packaging. These requirements challenge our ability to build and test these units. Further, larger boards with smaller components and higher node counts may continue. For example, a design that is currently drawing a circuit board diagram has approximately 116,000 nodes, more than 5,100 components, and more than 37,800 solder joints that require testing or confirmation. This unit also has BGA on top and bottom, BGA is next. Using traditional needle beds to test this size and complexity board, an ICT approach is not possible.
Increasing PCBA complexity and density is not a new issue in manufacturing processes, especially during testing. Realizing that increasing the number of test pins in the ICT test fixture is not the direction to go, we began to observe alternative circuit verification methods. Looking at the number of non-contacts per million probes, we found that at 5,000 nodes, many of the errors found (less than 31) may be due to probe contact issues rather than actual manufacturing defects (Table 1). So we set out to reduce the number of test pins, not to increase them. Nevertheless, the quality of our manufacturing process is evaluated throughout the PCBA. We decided that using a combination of traditional ICT and X-ray layering was a feasible solution.