| May 22, 2013
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All too often, valuable circuit boards are scrapped due to base material damage. Actually, boards with base material damage can be reliably repaired.
Now that large circuit boards can exceed 30-inch dimensions, may be up to a half-inch thick, weigh 30 to 50 pounds, and be worth up to $20,000 to $30,000 - the importance of knowing how to repair base material damage, rather than scrapping the board, may indeed make a significant impact on a company's bottom line.
A number of well established procedures exist for reliably repairing base material damage stemming from a variety of causes. Damage can include chipping, burns from overheated components and mis-oriented capacitors. Damage may occur during rework, such as delamination and measling caused by overheating the board with a soldering iron or a hot air tool, or may result from board design errors, requiring ...
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In every industry there is a gap between conception and execution. It doesn't take long in this business to learn that ideas are very important, but they're usually the easiest part of the process.
Putting a worthwhile idea into action can be exciting, challenging and humbling. To their dismay, one of our customers found a small but critical error. The ground plane that should have served as a return path for signals was missing between plated through holes in a section of their circuit board.
Thousands of boards were in the assembly pipeline, and thousands in the field, when a subtle disruption in the electronic operation of the final product became clear to the customer. As a result they discovered the assembly would not operate properly.
This problem existed between pads on a long row of closely spaced, plated ...
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Microscopes have become essential tools in the rework and repair department. While there have been many applications for other types of manually-operated vision systems, such as illuminated magnifiers and CCTV based systems, the importance of microscopes has been driven by the ever-shrinking size of electronic components, connections, and assemblies, and the spaces between adjacent components.
Microscopes used in this scenario are almost exclusively stereo zoom microscopes, which offer depth perception for the operator and the ability to zoom in for close work or to zoom out to check the work in relation to the surrounding circuit board topography.
It should be noted that the role of the microscope in rework is not one of inspection, but that of a tool under which the operator works; rework is performed while viewing, as differing from viewing or inspecting after the task is ...
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Trivia
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