Tag Archives: packaging

Packing Parts for Personal Manufacturing

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Manufacturing, especially small volume one-time-only builds (like a prototype) is hard. It’s not wise for most people to actively seek out chaos, but that’s what we do, and we do it wisely. That’s what we’ve been doing since 2003.

We do it because it’s hard and because it’s necessary.

A big part of quality manufacturing involves risk reduction. Prototyping and quick-turns inherently add in a lot of risk. While we’ve designed our processes and systems around turning that risk into a quality product, there are a few things that you, the customer, can do to help reduce risk even further.

One of the best things you can do to reduce risk is to prepare a well organized kit, as shown in this video:

You can send us your parts in short, cut strips, like you get from Digikey or Mouser, long continuous strips, full or partial reels, tubes or trays. We machine place from all of those types of packages. What’s important is clear labeling and organization.

Individual, or mixed/loose components are not good, though. Pins get bent, leads get contaminated, values get mixed… Leave them in the strip, even if it’s short. If you’ve got multiple short strips of the same part, we can still machine place. Don’t tape them together. We can deal with them as is.

Duane Benson
Peter Piper Picked a Peck of Pickeled Manufacturing

http://blog.screamingcircuits.com

It (0.3mm) Finally Happened

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Back in January of 2012, I wrote about the possibility of 0.3mm pitch BGAs being used here and there. I predicted that in a year, we’d see some 0.3mm pitch BGAs showing up. I was about three months off. Almost to the day.

I delivered a session at PCB West last month and asked if anyone had used a part with that pitch yet. One hand went up. That actually surprised me. What surprised me even more was when one of them (a 0.3mm pitch BGA, not a hand) arrived on our shipping dock in a parts kit earlier this week.

0.3mm pitch trimFor comparison, the land pattern for an 0402 passive component is about one millimeter long. This specific part is just shy of a millimeter square. Even as small as it is, this part can supply 750 mA continuous. The olden days are so very long gone.

We do many, many complex parts and PCBs. We’ve put 5,000 parts on a single PC board. We’ve built boards to be shot up in rockets and dunked way down in the ocean. Some very crazy stuff has come though our shop, but we don’t do everything. We don’t do 01005 passive components at the moment. Our machines have the technical capability, but we don’t rework them, which has to go along with the assembly capability, so we don’t support that form factor for now. The 0.3mm pitch components pretty much fall into that camp. Our machines can physically pick up and place the component, but until we’ve developed to process to assemble those parts with the quality people expect from us, we won’t be supporting them.

I expect we’ll be getting more and more requests for the form factor, so we’ll be looking at it. Keep checking back. One of these days, we’ll have the process down and reliable.

Duane Benson
It’s (Huey mm, Dewey mm, and Louie mm)/10

 

http://blog.screamingcircuits.com/