PROSPERING IN AUTOMOTIVE, TELECOM, AEROSPACE AND DEFENSE ELECTRONICS

From the beginning, we have specialized in the high reliability fields of automotive, telecom and aerospace/defense electronics. These applications must not fail despite the harshest operating environments imaginable. When a $1.98 calculator fails, there’s a momentarily annoyed owner who will probably forget about it within a few hours. When an automotive or aerospace component fails, lives can be lost. When a telecom switch fails, emergency services can be interrupted. These are serious issues. But there are differences among these industries.

Automotive
Automotive electronics run from the critically important (for example, air bag switches, anti–lock brake controls, engine controls) to the personally valued (entertainment systems, GPS systems, rear view mirror controls being just a few) but even a handful of failures in any application can ruin the supplier. There are, after all, only a small number of automakers and they have long memories.

A few characteristics separate the automotive world from most other industries:

• Unbelievably harsh operating environments. Not only can operating temperatures range from more than 100°C to –50°C, the thermal cycles can happen in a matter of minutes and several times a day. And, of course, there’s the chronic vibration… Solder joints, in particular, deteriorate rapidly under these conditions.
• Long life expectancy. An office computer may have a warranty that expires before it’s even taken out of the shipping carton, but automotive customers expect nothing less than at least a decade of flawless performance.
• Microscopic profit margins when the job is done well, massive losses when there’s a problem. This, in turn, leads to selection of the least expensive components. It’s an interesting problem: make the world’s most reliable products using some of the world’s cheapest components.
• Special component needs. There are components that can’t withstand the environmental conditions, even though they may sell for high prices. Picking the wrong component can be disastrous.
• Rigorous process documentation and arduous change procedures. It’s tempting to continue with sub–optimal processes because of the work involved in getting the customer’s approval for change.
• Just–in–time deliveries to the customer. The modern automotive assembly plant carries perhaps a day’s worth of inventory and often less. The customer expects that assemblies will be delivered when needed but not before. Just a few air express shipments to meet delivery deadlines can wipe out a year’s profits.
• Large runs of a single product. Although there are products for which the demand is only a few hundred at a time, the more normal volume is in the hundreds of thousands per year. There’s no reason why a production line running basically the same assembly 24/7 for a year should have uncontrolled defects.

The challenges of automotive electronics, therefore, consist of lowest possible production costs, highest possible reliability, and no production interruptions.

Cost Reductions and Efficiency Improvements
We’ve been very successful in helping clients succeed in the face of these challenges. We’ve pioneered changes that take out huge material costs (our clients were the first to use no–clean flux and frontrunners in eliminating conformal coating). Inspection and touchup have been removed, test yields rise. Process time is greatly reduced. Some clients have described what we do as lean manufacturing on steroids but we call it the EMS Science of Electronics Manufacturing.

Customer Solutions
Perhaps the most important benefit we provide, however, is better communication with customers and, if necessary, education of those customers. We function as honest brokers, speaking the truth to both clients and their customers. We cannot be hired to hide problems, but we can be trusted to devise the best solutions and obtain customer buy–in. We are especially aggressive in streamlining the acceptance of process changes.

Customer solutions includes root cause failure mode analysis and correction action. Inspecting more, the most common “solution,” is not corrective action. It is a way to institutionalize non–value–added activities that will still be in use long after the problem disappears.

Telecom
The typical telecom electronics plant produces small lots of highly varied assemblies. The operating conditions tend not to be as extreme as in automotive or aerospace (the temperature environments can be extreme, but the rates of change and number of lifetime thermal cycles are much less than in automotive). But the customers do not react well to failures and often issue workmanship requirements that require a forklift to move.

Small batch high variation assembly demands the most knowledgeable process engineers, highly disciplined load balancing and bottleneck control, good PCB designs and highly educated inspectors who reject only the truly defective conditions.

Well designed data collection systems are essential in the telecom electronics plant. And that data must be more than a count of the absolute number of defects. Quality management systems typically make the difference between success (low costs, high reliability) and failure (high costs, low reliability).

EMS has been working with the world’s leading telecom equipment companies for a quarter of a century. We obtained the first Belcore approval for no–clean fluxes more than 20 years ago. We specialize in giving inspectors the knowledge tools and the confidence to end rejection of reliable product they would otherwise send for rework. Most of all, we have a long record of eliminating costs and increasing reliability.

Aerospace and Defense
Aerospace/defense (especially aerospace) is an interesting middle ground between automotive and telecom. The operating environments are extreme like automotive and even tiny numbers of failures have nasty consequences. Production lots, however, tend to be small like telecom (or even smaller). And (an unusual twist) it is common to still be making a few replacement units two or three decades after the originals were sold (and conforming to the workmanship criteria that were in force during the original production, even if those criteria have been superseded by more modern standards).

Aerospace manufacturing typically employs far larger numbers of inspectors and hand soldering operators than other segments of the electronics industry. They inspect and reinspect. They often must add oddly configured components. There is almost universal belief that changing the appearance of an unattractive solder connection makes the product more reliable.

(One feature of aerospace design allows the industry to survive the rather high failures of circuits over time. The feature is redundant circuitry; when one circuit fails, a backup kicks in. The unit can be swapped out at the next service stop. In the absence of redundant circuitry, the lack of reliability associated with the overwhelming handling during all stages of production would make survival impossible.)

The keys to success in aerospace and military electronics are:

• Absolute understanding of the workmanship requirements (mostly what not to reject, since the norm is massive rework); our EMS Reliability Criteria and EMS Science of Soldering are immensely valuable in producing this state of bliss.
• Educating the customer; many of the customers' quality control personnel do not really understand the workmanship standards either and we have seen entire factories brought to their knees by overbearing customer inspectors rejecting totally reliable product that conforms to the criteria.
• Recognizing that the days of “cost plus” contracts that rewarded the supplier with more than a dollar for every dollar spent are now history. Aerospace and defense contractors today must be as efficient as the best electronics manufacturers of other types.

We can help
EMS has been helping some of the world’s most respected aerospace and defense contractors increase product reliability and profits for more than two decades. We can probably make important contributions to your company, too. To find out what EMS can do for you, please write or call (01)727–866–6502 x21.

Many current soldering standards and process parameters originated in the vacuum tube era.

The primary soldering challenge in the vacuum tube era was to create enough heat to prevent the solder from freezing before it flowed everywhere. The large pieces of metal absorbed most of the heat.

Many modern components are easily harmed by relatively small amounts of heat, especially when soldering irons are involved. We developed a scientific technique for preventing heat damage during hand soldering. No extra tools or steps are involved. It works perfectly with even basic soldering irons.

EMS Science of Soldering is the only way to learn this technique.