A “rougher” foil may improve stencil performance.

A high-performing stencil printing process deposits the right amount of material volume in the right place, at the right time, and at the lowest cost per print achievable. Every assembly professional strives for this utopia, leaving no solder paste stuck in the apertures or smeared on the underside of the stencil. Naturally, with all the variables, this state is difficult to achieve 100% of the time. A perfect gasket (board to stencil) does not exist in the electronics manufacturing real world. Transfer efficiency is managed through aperture designs to provide the desired material volume on the pad, and solder paste smear (or its potential) is alleviated by cleaning the underside of the stencil between prints to avoid bridging. Cleaning, of course, comes at a cost – both in consumables use and in production time. If more high-quality prints can be achieved between necessary cleans, consumables overhead will be lower and throughput will be higher. 

Additive manufacturing might not be ready for prime time, but it’s making inroads.

Sometimes I find myself walking around the shop floor asking, “Why do we have all this very expensive equipment? There must be a simpler, cheaper way to make a printed circuit board!” And yet, despite phenomenal technological strides, our industry still uses the same basic manufacturing processes since the earliest days of circuit board production: drill – image – plate – press – repeat – then route.

Observing so many different processes, simple logic might make you think printing conductive ink would have replaced plating processes long ago. Yet while printed electronics has advanced considerably, it is not ready for prime time for all applications.

Relying on a single source is a recipe for failure.

“Good, fast and cheap … pick two” is an old maxim that applies – to a degree, anyway – to the printed circuit board industry.

The implications, of course, are that if it’s fast and good, it’s going to be expensive; if it’s good and cheap, it will require lots of time; and if it’s cheap and fast, the quality will be poor.

PCB buyers should keep this in mind when choosing vendors and avoid relying too much on one supplier if they want good quality boards delivered on time and at a reasonable price.

Industry 5.0 promises a more humanistic approach to production.

It has been over a year since governments began lifting restrictions on citizens’ movements to resuscitate their economies, and some 18 months since the Ever Given blocked the Suez Canal in March 2021, sending global shipping activities into spasm.

But supply chains today are in critical condition. Assets and materials are in the wrong places around the world, factories are struggling to resume normal activities, and large numbers of people are simply not working, having either not returned to work after the pandemic or become part of what is now termed the Great Resignation, or the Big Quit. Some 20 million workers around the world, in the largest and most advanced economies, have left their posts, citing factors such as burnout, pressures at home and isolation, and feeling unvalued by their companies.