Today’s PCB microelectronics assembly and manufacturing is still in its early stages and depending on who you talk to, it takes on different methods and procedures at different EMS providers. So, you can safely say that not all microelectronics assembly and manufacturing houses are alike.
A good measure to determine if you have the right and effective PCB microelectronics assembly and manufacturing partner is whether or not that partner has successfully assembled and implemented tiny sensors, biosensors, MEMS devices, chip on board (CoB), and flip chip devices, especially in miniature medical products. For example, Fig. 1 shows an image sensor that needs to be placed with utmost accuracy for a LIDAR application.
The PCB microelectronics assembly and manufacturing house must be experienced and up to date on implementing these highly advanced micro-miniature devices since chipmakers, themselves, are at the cutting edge of technology with these devices. In some instances, they have not completely proven their procedures and manufacturing steps for these new devices, which may be in a developmental phase. So, you have to take special care when evaluating your PCB microelectronics assembly partner.
There are more details in our SMT007 column. However, to provide you a better understanding, here are some tips.
- Rely on the experience base of a PCB microelectronics assembly EMS provider to figure out the critical processes and methodologies.
- Floating dies pose certain pick and place challenges. For example, wire bonding process must hold the die in place without having a base or adhesive in place to hold the dies.
- Precise pick and place is crucial for sensors, biosensors, MEMS devices, CoB, and flip chips since they are very small, flimsy, very thing, and extremely fragile.
- Image capturing sensors demand customized tooling for pick and place so they can be placed accurately on a physical location on the board.
- Design of Experiment or DOE is critical to create the right solutions for these PCB microelectronics assembly challenges associated with these tiny devices.
- Considerable brainstorming and customer interactions are critical to design a process and step-by-step methodologies to perform DOEs.
These DOE steps are essential to assure the best way to tackle each project, create step-by-step process methods, and determine the necessary instructions. After the DOE is done, you verify and inspect it to assure the project is assembled with high-quality, repeatability, reliability, and accuracy.