Defective Reduction from Solder-Paste Strains on a Flexible Printed Circuit
Abstract—During the last decades, consumer electronic devices have been integrated with our everyday activities. One component that helps these devices to achieve with their small sizes and versatile functions is a flexible printed circuit (FPC). Each FPC consists of various electronic components on a flexible conducted surface using a special assembling process, called surface mount technology (SMT). Within the SMT process, the most significant defective is the solder-paste strain on pads of a FPC, which accounts for 0.13% of total products manufactured. Such defective products cannot be reworked. Small group techniques revealed that the cleaning routine of a solder printing machine is one of the root causes. Followed the six-sigma approach, the defective rate is selected as the main response for hypothesis tests and design of experiment. Determining of the optimal parameters in the cleaning routine using two-level full factorial design with two replications suggest same direction and 80 cm per second cleaning speed without vacuum as optimal setting. The result after one month of implementation showed that the defective rate was reduced to 0.06%.
Index Terms—flexible printed circuit, xix sigma, screening in SMT process, design of experiments
Cite: Chantach Luxnanan and Oran Kittithreerapronchai, "Defective Reduction from Solder-Paste Strains on a Flexible Printed Circuit," Journal of Industrial and Intelligent Information, Vol. 4, No. 1, pp. 41-45, January 2016. doi: 10.12720/jiii.4.1.41-45