Taming IPC-A-610

IPC-A-610 is a popular industry standard and contains a great amount of good information. However, it is not a user–friendly document. There is too much unnecessary content and the images are often unclear. The bulk and complexity of the document gets in the way of effective use.

Because of the complexity, everyone is confused, especially inspectors and operators. They think their job is to reject and rework anything that doesn't fit their mental picture of perfect. They don't realize that rework causes failures. Rework that isn't required is often as bad as ignoring real defects.

We have spent more than a decade refining our guide to the requirements of IPC-A-610 and IPC-ANSI-J-STD-001. The resulting document's sizeis only about 15% of the IPC-A-610 guide yet includes every requirement. Anyone can quickly and easily master this document, free from the uncertainties that hold back users of the IPC guide.

How is this possible? It's just a matter of understanding communications. IPC's guide is filled with repetitions and irrelevant instructions. For example, if the purpose of the standard is to prevent unreliable work from reaching the customer, why include pictures of acceptable and perfect connections? Our guide shows only the unacceptable conditions; anything not included in those instructions is, by definition, acceptable.

A client's report on the usefulness of our EMS Reliability Criteria can be found in the right–hand column of this page.

 

Electronics Manufacturing Sciences helped us in many, often surprising, ways. The most significant contribution was the creation and implementation of a user–friendly reliability criteria document.

This was not a minor accomplishment. Nor was it a tool we had anticipated needing because our existing quality criteria formed the base for most standards used throughout the electronics industry. Our workforce was mature, extensively trained and very experienced.

The original standard filled hundreds of pages and covered every imaginable condition. The document produced by EMS was less than 40 pages, including large, clear computer graphics, yet it covered every important requirement. Important conditions with previously ambiguous wording were restated so effective evaluation became easy.

The results were impressive. The amount of rework dropped dramatically because inspectors stopped rejecting reliable connections, test yields increased because assemblies were subjected to less handling, and production cycle time decreased.

If this had been the only improvement EMS provided us (and it wasn’t), they still would have been an excellent investment.

James H. Mosher
Manager, Switching & Network Products
Manufacturing and Engineering
Lucent Technologies, Inc.
Columbus, Ohio

 

 

 

Science of Soldering:

The Recipe

The Ultimate Operator Training Course

What is a chef doing on a web site about soldering?

Soldering is a lot like baking a cake. There are required ingredients, a required sequence for combining the ingredients, and required temperature for required time.

So, we created a soldering "recipe" that will always produce perfect results. There are just 7 steps, but each step must be performed in exactly the right sequence.

Most soldering operators have limited education and can be intimidated by the chemistry, metallurgy and physics of soldering. However, a recipe is a concept with which they are familiar. A recipe does not frighten them. With the recipe, everyone understands and accepts scientific concepts that have always been considered too difficult for operators.

Students in our classes are given a soldering exercise that contains several out–of–control process problems. Materials melt, solder refuses to flow and defect piles on top of defect. Helped by experiments and demonstrations, the students troubleshoot their process and eliminate the defects using the recipe.

There is another reason for our teaching methodology. Most operators have been soldering for many years and believe they know everything there is to know about soldering. After all, they have always been evaluated on the basis of solder cosmetics and their work was always cosmetically perfect. But their defenses drop when they are unable to solve the process problem. They realize that their work in the past had not really been reliable. And they become open to learning.

The Same Core Lessons
Taught to Engineers

The lessons of the operator course are the same fundamentals we teach engineers. The language is simpler and the lessons do not go into the concepts as deeply, but the operators are indeed being taught like engineers. When they return to work, they are able to communicate effectively with process engineers when materials problems show up.

The only other difference between the operator and engineering classes is the amount of manual skills development. Operators, of course, spend several days applying the recipe to various types of through–hole and surface mount exercises.

We’d like to discuss why Science of Soldering: The Recipe© belongs in your company. Please use this form or call (727)866-6502 ext. 21

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Electronics Manufacturing Sciences, Inc., St. Petersburg, FL 33711