I was recently asked to give a presentation and audit an assembly line regarding minimizing “tombstoning” of passives at a major electronics assembler. As my presentation brought out, tombstoning can be caused by many factors: the reflow profile, the solder metal composition (for lead-free applications, SAC 387 tends to tombstone more than SAC 305), off-center placement, nitrogen reflow atmosphere, buried vias, etc. After two hours of talking, I walked the line that “had a problem with tombstoning.”

As I started asking, it became clear that no one knew the magnitude of the problem.

“How many passives are on each board?” I asked. No one knew.

“How many DPMO (defects per million opportunities) for tombstones have you had recently?” Also unknown.

As people scurried to get the data, it dawned on us that tombstoning might not be as big an issue as was thought. It was more of a local legend.

Finally, we got some data. Each board had about 1000 passives, and the company had produced 100 boards with a total of two tombstones in the past two hours. Tombstones were the only defect. Hmmmmm, two bad boards out of 100 = 98% first-pass yield, not bad! From a DPMO perspective, they had two defects per 200,000 (two defect opportunities per passive) opportunities or 10 DPMO, which is beyond world-class. This level of DPMO would be very difficult to improve on without massive engineering investment. It is “in the noise” and it is likely caused by “common cause” variation.

I then asked how much money it costs to repair a tombstone; as expected, no one knew. My guess was less than $2. This situation is the rare case where yields are so good, it may not pay to make engineering investment to improve them.

This isn’t the point of the story, however. In a case like this, the response — whatever it is — must be data driven. Only with the proper failure rate data, plotted in a Pareto chart, and a complete understanding of all costs, can the appropriate action plan be developed.

Always be data driven!