ABSTRACT
In the electronic industry, Surface-Mount Technology (SMT) is one of the robust production work processes for printed circuit board assembly (PCBA). SMT involves several state-of-the-art machines, such as a stencil printer, pick and place machine, and reflow oven, to solder and assemble electronic components onto printed circuit boards. In the production flow, some failure prevention mechanisms are deployed to ensure the designated quality of PCBA, including solder paste inspection (SPI), automated optical inspection (AOI), and in-circuit testing (ICT). However, such methods to locate the failures are reactive in nature, which may create waste and require additional effort for re-manufacturing and re-inspecting the PCBs. Worse still, the process performance of the assembly process cannot be guaranteed at a high level. An intelligent manufacturing process improvement system (IMPIS) is implemented in the SMT production work-flow. IMPIS is a pro-active approach to investigate and manage the process of quality performance and to define the critical process parameters. To validate the effectiveness of the IMPIS system, a case study of an electronics manufacturer in the solder paste printing process was conducted. The contributions of this study are two-fold: (i) pressure, blade angle, and speed are identified as the critical factors in the solder paste printing process; and (ii) a significant improvement in the yield performance of PCBA can be achieved as a component in the smart manufacturing.
