Category Archives: Dr. Ron

Materials expert Dr. Ron Lasky is a professor of engineering and senior lecturer at Dartmouth, and senior technologist at Indium Corp. He has a Ph.D. in materials science from Cornell University, and is a prolific author and lecturer, having published more than 40 papers. He received the SMTA Founders Award in 2003.

Test Your SMT IQ

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Folks,

Mary had worked at a small SMT “mom and pop” shop for 12 years. Business was always good and she moved up to CFO of the 60 person company. Revenue had been over $12 million for a few years with profits north of $1 million each year. She marveled how well Fred, the owner,  managed the small firm. As CFO, she was well aware of the strong financial strength of the company.

Mary was stunned when 18 months ago, Fred said he wanted to retire in less than two years, and he wanted her to “buy him out.” Fred was fit and spunky, but 75 years old was now in the rear view mirror.

Mary was more than stunned by the price Fred wanted; it was way, way too low. She even “complained” about this. But, Fred considered her more as a daughter and insisted on the low price. However, one of the concerns they both had was that Fred was really also the chief engineer. They had many loyal workers, as Fred paid 50% over the local rate and provided great benefits, but no one could fill in for Fred in the technical aspects of running the shop.

Fred had been trying to coach Mary for the past 18 months so that she would understand the technical aspects of SMT assembly better. Mary was a fast learner, but with only 6 months left before Fred’s retirement, they both agreed they needed to hire a chief engineer.

So, Fred developed an SMT IQ Test for the candidates. If they could not get at least 80%, they would not be considered. Fred argued that if you were really good enough, you had to know 80% of these questions. Here they are:

  1. What does the “A” in SAC305 stand for?
  2. The belt speed on a reflow oven is 2 cm/s. The PCB with spacing is 36 cm. What is the maximum time that the placement machines must finish placing the components on the PCB to keep up with the reflow oven?
  3. In mils, what is a typical stencil thickness?
  4. BTCs are one of the most common components today. A subset of BTCs is the QFN package.
    • What does BTC stand for?
    • What does QFN stand for?
  5. What is the melting temperature of tin-lead eutectic solder?
  6. In mm, what is the finest lead spacing for a PQFP?
  7. Are solder pastes thixotropic or dilatant?
  8. In stencil printing, what is response to pause?
  9. For a circular stencil aperture for BGAs or CSPs, what is the minimum area ratio that is acceptable?
  10. What are the approximate dimensions of a 0201 passive in mils?

Try the test. Stay tuned for the answers.

Cheers,

Dr. Ron

Low-Temperature Reflow, High-Temperature Use

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Folks,

Soldering enables modern electronics. Without solder, electronics would not exist. Copper melts at 1085°C, yet with solder, we can bond copper to copper at about 235°C or less with current lead-free solders. These lower temperatures are required, as electronic packages and PWBs are made of polymer materials that cannot survive temperatures much above 235°C.

Before the advent of RoHS, tin-lead solders melted at about 35°C less than lead-free solders. So today, soldering temperatures are at the highest in history. For some applications, it would be desirable to have solders that melted at closer to tin-lead temperatures. This desire has increased interest in low-melting point solders, such as tin-bismuth solders. Eutectic SnBi melts at 138°C, so reflow oven temperatures in the 170°C range can be used. These lower reflow temperatures are easier on some fragile components and PWBs and will reduce defects such as PWB popcorning and measling. However, the lower melting point of SnBi solders limits their application in many harsh environments, such as automobile and military applications. As a rule of thumb, a solder should not be used above 80 to 90% of its melting point on the Kelvin scale. For SnBi solder, this temperature range is 55.8 – 96.9°C. These temperatures are well below the use temperature of some harsh environments. In addition, SnBi solders can be brittle and thus perform poorly in drop shock testing.

So, the electronics world could use a solder that can reflow at a little over 200°C, but still have a high use temperature. This situation would appear to be an unsolvable conundrum. However, my colleagues at Indium, led by Dr. Ning-Cheng Lee, have solved it. They used an indium-containing solder powder, Powder A, that melts at <180°C and combined it with Powder B that melts at ~220°C. By reflowing at about 205°C, Powder A melts and Powder B is dissolved by the melted Powder A. To achieve this effect, the 205°C temperature must be held for approximately two minutes. The remelt temperature of the final solder joint is above 180°C. I discussed the phenomenon of a liquid metal dissolving another that melts at a higher temperature before. An extreme example of this effect is mercury dissolving gold at room temperature. So, don’t drop any gold or silver jewelry into a wave soldering pot and expect to fish it out an hour later!

Powder A would not be a candidate on its own as it displays some melting at 113°C and some at 140°C.

Using the criteria above, the use temperature of this new solder powder mix can be in the 89.4 – 134.7°C range, after reflow, as the remelt temperature is above 180°C. Tests performed by Dr. Lee and his team have shown the resulting solder joints also have good to excellent thermal cycling and drop shock performance.

Figures 1-3 show schematically how the melting of the two powders would melt at a peak reflow temperature of 205°C.

Figure 1.  Powder A and Powder B at room temperature.


Figure 2. At 205°C, Powder A has melted and it is starting to dissolve to Powder B.


Figure 3. After about a minute at 205°C, Powder B starts to dissolve. Given enough time, it will completely dissolve in Powder A, resulting in a new alloy that has a remelt temperature over 180°C, as well as good to excellent thermal cycle and drop shock performance. 

To me, this invention is one of the most significant in SMT in a generation. It could be argued that it is like finding the holy grail of soldering: melting at low-temperature with a service life at high-temperature.

Cheers,

Dr. Ron

PS. I developed an Excel spreadsheet to calculate the use temperatures. It converts degrees C into K. I used it to calculate the use temperatures above. If you would like a copy, send me a note at [email protected].

Tin Pest in Medieval Culture

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Folks,

Readers may remember that I have had an interest in tin pest for some time. Tin pest can occur if nearly-pure tin is exposed to cold temperatures (<13.2oC) for long periods of time. At the end of this post, I provide a short summary of the tin pest phenomenon. See this striking time lapse video of tin pest forming; I assume the time period is over many months.

The reason for this post is that a medieval scholar, Beata Lipi?ska, from Poland is studying tin pest and its effects on medieval culture, most notably in church organ pipes. She has contacted me to see if I can help her find papers that discuss tin pest from a historical point of view. If readers have any references that could help Beata, please contact her directly at [email protected].

Figure 1. Tin pest forms in Sn .05 Cu alloy from Plumbridge. See the paper referenced below.

What is Tin Pest?
Tin is a metal that is allotropic, meaning that it has different crystal structures under varying conditions of temperature and pressure. Tin has two allotropic forms. “Normal” or white beta tin has a stable, tetragonal crystal structure with a density of 7.31g/cm3. Upon cooling below 13.2oC, beta tin slowly turns into alpha tin. “Grey” or alpha tin has a cubic structure and a density of only 5.77g/cm3 . Alpha tin is also a semiconductor, not a metal. The expansion of tin from white to grey causes most tin objects to crumble.

The macro conversion of white to grey tin takes on the order of 18 months. The photo, which is likely the most famous modern photograph of tin pest, shows the phenomenon quite clearly.

This photo is titled “The Formation of Beta-Tin into Alpha-Tin in Sn-0.5Cu at T <10oC” and is referenced from a paper by Y. Karlya, C. Gagg, and W.J. Plumbridge, “Tin Pest in Lead-Free Solders,” in Soldering and Surface Mount Technology, 13/1 [2000] 39-40.

This phenomenon has been known for centuries and there are many interesting, probably apocryphal, stories about tin pest. Perhaps the most famous of stories is that of the tin buttons on Napoleon’s soldiers’ coats disintegrating from tin pest while on their retreat from Moscow. Another common anecdotal story during the middle ages was that Satan was to blame for the decline of the tin organ pipes in Northern European churches, as tin pest often looks like the tin has become “diseased”. 

Initially, tin pest was called “tin disease” or “tin plague”. I believe that the name “tin pest” came from the German translation for the word “plague” (i.e., in German, plague is “pest”).

To most people with a little knowledge of materials, the conversion of beta to alpha tin at colder temperatures seems counter-intuitive. Usually materials shrink at colder temperatures; they do not expand. Although it appears that the mechanism is not completely understood, it is likely due to the grey alpha tin having a lower entropy than white beta tin. With the removal of heat at the lower temperatures, a lower entropy state would likely be more stable.

Since the conversion to grey tin requires expansion, the tin pest will usually nucleate at an edge, corner, or surface. The nucleation can take 10’s of months, but once it starts, the conversion can be rapid, causing structural failure within months.

Although tin pest can form at <13.2oC, most researchers believe that the kinetics are very sluggish at this temperature. There seems to be general agreement in the literature that the maximum rate of tin pest formation occurs at -30o to -40oC.

Cheers,

Dr. Ron

Stencil Aperture Design for the Pin in Paste (PIP) Process

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Peter writes,

Dear Dr. Ron,

I am trying to implement the Pin-in-Paste (PIP) process. The PWB is 63 mils thick, the component pin diameter is 47 mils, the PWB hole diameter is 87 mils, and the PWB pad diameter is 120 mils. I used the Indium StencilCoach software and the result said that I needed a stencil aperture with a 416 mil diameter for the 5 mil thick stencil I was using.

That stencil aperture diameter is way too big. What gives?

Best,

Peter

Dear Peter,

The issue is that your PWB hole diameter is too large. It is 40 mils greater than the component pin diameter. This situation results in a very large amount of solder required to fill the mostly empty PWB hole. See Figure 1. Since solder paste is about 50% by volume flux, quite a bit of paste is often needed to form a good solder joint.

Figure 1
Fig. 1. This figure is a cross-section schematic of a component mounted on a PWB. The fillet, hole, and pin volumes are shown and the resulting solder volume needed. If the component pin is much smaller than the PWB hole diameter, more solder paste will be needed than the pin-in-paste printing process can provide.

Chatting with my friends, Jim Hall and Phil Zarrow of ITM and Jim McLenaghan of Creyr Innovation, they all recommend that the PWB hole diameter be in the range of 10 to 12 mils larger than the pin diameter. In your case, this would be a hole diameter of 58 mils (I chose 11 mils greater than the pin diameter) and a PWB pad diameter of say 80 mils. The software calculates that a stencil aperture diameter of 194 mils is required (see Figure 2). It might be better to choose a square aperture of 172 mils on a side as seen in the output below. If this size stencil aperture is still too large, solder preforms can help. I will discuss using them in a future post.

Figure 2
Figure 2. The right hand column of this figure shows that a round stencil aperture diameter of 194 mils (2 x 97.184, the third cell from the bottom) is required to form a good solder joint in this application. It might be advantageous to use a square aperture of 172 mils on a side, as show in the fourth cell from the bottom in the right column.

By the way, Jim McLenaghan refined some earlier work that resulted in the formula for the fillet volume used in StencilCoach. Zarrow and Hall just released a book called Troubleshooting Electronic Assembly: Wisdom from the Board Talk Crypt. These three folks are some of the most knowledgeable people in electronics assembly today.

Cheers,

Dr. Ron

The Area Ratio for Odd-Shaped Stencil Apertures

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Joey writes:

Dear Dr. Ron,

I have a stencil aperture with an unusual shape. See Figure 1. How do I calculate the area ratio? The stencil thickness is 5 mils. The dimensions of the aperture are also in mils.

Figure 1. Joey’s Stencil Aperture

Joey,

The area ratio is simply the area of the stencil aperture opening divided by the area of the sidewalls. For common aperture geometries such as circles, squares, etc. it is easy to derive formulas. See Figure 2.

Figure 2. Formulas can be developed for common aperture shapes.

For an unusual shape like yours, it is easiest to simply calculate and divide the areas. From Figure 1, we get that area of the aperture opening as: 40*24+ the area of the two triangles. A little geometry (can you do it?) shows each triangle to have an area of 89 sq mils. So, the total area is 960 + 2*89 = 1138 sq mils. The perimeter is 40+24+16+16+28+12+16+16 = 168 mils, hence the area of the sidewalls is 168*5 = 840 sq mils. Therefore, the area ratio is 1138/840 = 1.355. Experience has shown that an area ratio of > 0.66 is needed for good solder paste transfer efficiency, so this stencil aperture will do well for transfer efficiency.

Careful thought would suggest that the triangular protrusions alone do not have a good area ratio. Calculations show their area ratios to be 0.37. So, the transfer efficiency in this part of the aperture might not be good. However, the area of the rectangle is so great, more than five times that of the triangles, as to alleviate this concern.

Dr. Ron



Autonomous Vehicles Even Farther Out in Time

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Folks,

Readers of this blog will remember that I have been a skeptic of self-driving cars emerging in the near term. I am even less sanguine today. A recent article supports my perspective. Humans just do so many things effortlessly that sensors and computers cannot duplicate.

As an example, suppose there are five people at a street corner. These individuals non-verbally communicate intent that other humans easily pick-up on. If they are talking to each other and not facing the road, a human rightly concludes they are not planning on crossing. If they are facing the road and looking at the traffic, a human expects they plan to cross. This intuition is well beyond any AI’s ability to interpret and will be for decades to come.

Figure 1. A human recognizes that these students aren’t planning on crossing the street.

Autonomous vehicles are typically over designed to not cause accidents. Therefore, in some cases, if a pedestrian sticks their hand out into a road to wave at a self-driving car, it will stop. Whereas a human would recognize that the person is just goofing-off or being friendly.

All of this new information makes Elon Musk’s claim that Tesla will have a car on the road in 2022 without a steering wheel hard to accept.

To be fair, self-driving cars in controlled conditions, such as low traffic, well-marked routes, in good weather, will become more common in the decade ahead. However, an autonomous vehicle that can pick me up from my poorly marked 200 foot driveway, off an unmarked country road in Vermont, and then drive me to terminal C at Boston’s Logan airport is many decades away.

So, if you know someone who wants to be a truck driver, I feel that that will continue to be a fruitful career for a long time. In addition, those of us who manufacture electronics can take comfort in the fact that autonomous vehicles will need much more electronics than originally thought.

Cheers,

Dr. Ron

Thixotropy: An Important Solder Paste Property

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Folks,

To the SMT process engineer, the second most important thixotropic material in their lives is solder paste. If solder paste was not thixotropic, it would be difficult to print and would likely slump after printing the paste. What is a thixotropic material? It is a material that has a low viscosity when it is shear stressed and a high viscosity when it is not shear stressed. So, when the solder paste is forced through the stencil aperture by a squeegee, its viscosity plummets and allows it to fill the aperture. See Figure 1.

Figure 1. The viscosity of solder paste dramatically decreases as it is forced through the stencil aperatures.

When the stencil is removed, the resulting solder paste deposit experiences no shear stress so the deposit maintains the shape of a “brick.” See Figure 2. So thixotropy is a very helpful property of solder pastes.

Figure 2. After printing, the solder paste viscosity is high, enabling the depost to maintain the brick shape. Figure courtesy of Ron Lasky, Jim Hall, and Phil Zarrow.

If solder paste was dilatant, it would be a disaster. These materials are the opposite of thixotropic materials. They have a low viscosity when not shear stressed and a high viscosity when shear stressed. So they could not be forced through the stencil aperture and, if they could, they would flow all over the board. Cornstarch and water is an example of a dilatant material.

Oh, yes, what is the most important thixotropic material to the SMT process engineer? Their blood. When getting up from lying down, our heart automatically makes a strong “pump” to rush the flow of blood to our head. Since blood is thixotropic, it shear thins and makes it easier for our heart to get the needed blood up to our head. If blood was not thixotropic, we might faint every time we rise from reclining!

Cheers,

Dr. Ron

Statistically Significant vs. Practically Significant in SMT Data Collection

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Folks,

Let’s assume your company has decided that transfer efficiency (TE) is the key metric in determining solder paste quality. Transfer efficiency is the ratio of the volume of the solder paste deposit divided by the volume of the stencil aperture. While you agree that TE is an important metric, you are a little troubled with the recent results in a solder paste evaluation. Two out of 10 pastes are fighting for the top spot and it looks like TE will be the deciding metric. Paste A had a TE of 99.5% and Paste B had a TE of 99%. So management wants to go with paste A. You are troubled because paste A has a poor response-to-pause. If it is left on the stencil for 15 minutes or more the first print must be discarded. This weakness may result in 30 minutes or so of lost production time in a 3-shift operation.

However, the TE test results showed that the TE of paste A was statistically significantly better than paste B. You think about this situation and something doesn’t make sense — 5% and 99% are quite close.

You dust off your statistics textbook and review hypothesis testing. Then it hits you, with very large sample sizes, means that are closer and closer together can be statistically significantly different.

The data show that paste A has a mean of 99.5% and a standard deviation of 10%, whereas paste B has a mean of 99% and also a standard deviation of 10%. The sample sizes were 10,000 samples each. These large sample sizes are important in the analysis. The standard error of the mean (SEM) is used to compare means in a hypothesis test. SEM is defined as the standard deviation (s) divided by the square root of the sample size (n):

So as the sample size increases, the SEM becomes smaller or in statistics lingo “tighter.” With very large sample sizes, this tightness enables the ability to distinguish statistically between means that are closer and closer together. This situation was not a concern with sample sizes of less than 100, however with the modern solder paste volume scanning systems of today, sample sizes greater than 1000 are common.

Figure 1 shows the expected sampling distribution of the mean for samples with a TE of 99.5% and 99.0% and a sample size of 100, both have a standard deviation of 10%. Note that to your eye you do not see much difference. However, with the means and standard deviations the same and sample sizes of 10,000 the sampling distributions of the mean are clearly different in Figure 2.

The reality though, is that there is no difference in the results in Figure 1 and 2. The tiny difference in the means (0.5%) may be statistically significant with a sample size of 10,000, but is it practically significant? Would this small difference really matter in a production environment? Almost certainly not.

Figure 1. Sampling distribution of the mean for a sample size of 100.
Figure 2 Sampling distribution of the mean for a sample size of 10,000.

So, with large sample sizes, we need to ask ourselves if the difference is practical. For TE, I think we can be confident that a difference of 0.5% is not practically significant. But, what if the difference was 2% or 5%? Clearly, experiments should be performed to determine at what level a difference is significant.

With the case discussed above, I would much prefer the paste that has a 99.0% TE and a good response-to-pause.

Cheers,

Dr. Ron

Dispelling The ‘Five Ball Rule’

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Michel writes:

Dr. Ron, when if comes to SMT printing of solder paste, why do some people use the five-ball rule for rectangular apertures and the eight-ball rule for circular apertures?

Michel:

The “Five Ball Rule” is another metric that SMT assembly industry leaders believe, but it is difficult to find its origin. It states that when selecting a solder paste, five of the largest solder balls should be able to fit across the width of the smallest rectangular stencil aperture. See Figure 1a for a 0.2mm wide rectangular aperture.

Typically, the largest solder ball diameter is assumed at the 90th percentile. See Figure 2. So, in this example, a type 4 solder paste would fit the five ball rule as the largest solder ball is 0.038mm. Five times 0.038 is 0.190mm, just a little less than the aperture width of 0.2mm. It should be remembered that this is a “rule.” not a “law.” So let’s say you had 4.5 balls across the aperture with instead of 5, it would most likely be OK. 

Figure 1. A comparison of the Five and Eight Ball Rules

Figure 2. Solder Powder Sizes

A generation ago, the advent of circular apertures to support BGA and CSP packages necessitated a new “rule.” Figure 1b shows why the five-ball rule is inadequate for circular apertures. Although five type 3 solder balls fit along the 0.275 diameter, off the diameter, there is not enough room for many solder balls.  Hence, an insufficient amount of solder paste would be printed.

For the same aperture, if a type 4 paste is used, 7 or 8 solder balls span the diameter and the amount of paste printed would be much closer to the volume of the aperture.

For a little more on this topic, see a past post.

Cheers,

Dr. Ron

Submit an Abstract to SMTA Pan Pac

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Folks,

This coming February will be my third SMTA Pan Pac. Pan Pac is a very enjoyable and rewarding conference. It is small enough that you can get to know all of the speakers, yet large enough that there is a full venue. For those of us in the northern part of the US, it is also a nice break from the winter weather. The first time I went I was surprised that it wasn’t very expensive. For this coming conference, air tickets from Boston are as low as $600 and the hotel is about $200 per night.

The conference will be held on the “Big island” of Hawaii. If you come early or stay late there are many interesting attractions, including the active volcanoes and the Mauna Kea Observatories. So for sure come to the conference, but why not submit an abstract to be a speaker? If interested in submitting an abstract go to this site.

Cheers,

Dr. Ron

A view of part of the Big Island.