It’s adding unnecessary costs to your supply chain.

Want a more robust and cost-effective supply chain? Shrink it. Remove the expensive middleman. You don’t need to pay a PCB broker a 20 to 40% markup to, basically, relay information from you to overseas vendors.

The truth is the PCB broker business model – where companies buy printed circuit boards from an overseas manufacturer and then resell them to a customer – is outdated. And it’s adding unnecessary costs to your supply chain.

Years ago, brokers were small operations, with perhaps three to five people. And at one time, they did provide a valuable service to their customers, offering lower prices on boards made overseas, while handling all the details of procurement from foreign vendors in what was often a challenging PCB buying cycle.

Inappropriately sized pads can result in excessive solder and, eventually, defects.

This month we show soldering of 01005 chip resistors from an early project with lead-free assembly. The microsection image in FIGURE 1 shows a few issues, but it’s the circles in both joints that caught my eye. Yes, they are voids before they are unmasked. During sectioning we stopped just before entering the void. Most would have continued a few more micros to remove the thin sliver of solder, which was the wall of the void, to show the void. But everyone has seen voids before!

When commercial AOIs were not up to the task, a little internal ingenuity saved the day.

While there is great debate in the quality community as to who first made the observation that visual inspection by humans is not 100% effective (both W. Edwards Deming and Dr. Joseph M. Juran have been given credit) and even some debate about the true effectiveness rate (is it 75%? 80%? 85%?), all agree it is inefficient and error-prone. Yet, automated optical inspection is often deemed not cost-effective for relatively simple processes in many factories.

One area that is often problematic for electronics manufacturing services providers is odd-form part through-hole insertion. Through-hole odd-form parts continue to be used when a part’s weight or need for a more robust solder joint makes that level of interconnection more reliable. Transformers, large capacitors, diodes, relays, connectors and pressure sensors are few examples of parts that are often still packaged as through-hole. Manual assembly, like manual inspection, is prone to variation and associated defects, particularly issues such as misaligned parts, missing parts or wrong parts. Odd-form parts are typically of a size or shape that makes automated insertion methods impractical.

As we venture out among the aerospace industry, it helps to know the lingo.

Four years have elapsed since we last provided discerning readers with a helpful field guide to the major species inhabiting trade shows. Four years is a long time. Has anything changed? Have the major species evolved? Regressed? Have some gone extinct or suffered outright obsolescence? What are the replacements?

The quest for knowledge beckons us back to the field.

Curiosity about a changing world and an evolving industry propels us to don pith helmets and binoculars and return to the source. Post-graduate work commences now.