Jet Printed Solder Paste and Cleaning Challenges

Can manufacturers ensure they are sufficiently clean to meet the stringent quality and reliability demands?

It has been well documented that flux residues can lead to failure mechanisms such as leakage current, electrochemical migration and dendritic growth and these can negatively impact the reliability of the PCBs. This is especially true in the case of Class 3 assemblies wherein failure is not an option.

Recent evidence has shown that it is becoming extremely challenging to consistently deliver the correct amount of solder using the screen printing process. More and more manufacturers in today’s production environment are overcoming this challenge by incorporating jet printing as an additional add-on step to add extra solder paste volume to solve such challenges. Solder paste jetting offers the flexibility to deposit the right amount of solder paste volume on the boards that have both miniature and large size components that need to be soldered adjacent to each other.