Manufacturing of electronic boards

Some of you may know that I work in the electronics industry (for automotive applications) with Johnson Controls. This is the reason why I am in daily contact with industrial means of manufacturing of complex electronic boards. For a long time now, I wanted to share some of the knowledge I acquired, some of the continuously renewed amazement I share in front of these industrial tools. But I could not really go and shoot photos in the manufacturing plants of my company.

Everything changes as I found some freely available information available on the Internet. For example, AMD-ATI (designer and manufacturer or graphics cards for personal computers) published a small presentation video.

You can’t see much, it’s too short? Here come detailled videos from the Institute for Interconnecting and Packaging Electronic Circuits (IPC): IPC Training/Certification Videos. You will find there videos detailling all the stages of manufacturing and nearly all the significant technologies included in the manufacturing of electronic boards.

Most of them are available on YouTube and Google Video.

For those who went through all these steps and are still willing to learn, I also have a very intersting and much more technical presentation on a parallel issue and technology item: lead-free soldering. As a matter of fact, for years, the electronic industry has used a large quantity of lead (a cheap metal very attractive because it can become luidi at a relatively low temperature). but with the disappearance of a lot of the other sources of lead in our environment (lead poisonning (also known as saturnism, plumbism, Devon colic, or painter’s colic) is a medical condition caused by increased levels of the metal lead in the blood leading to neurological damage) electronic waste was adopting a bad sheep reputation. We are currently in the center of an intense transition to safer technologies. But it’s a whole industry which has to adopt completly new techniques and abandon very solid body of evidence and state of the art knowledge to learn uing “lead-free soldering”.

If you are ready for 30 minutes of concentration and listening, here is a video conference about this issue and a specific part of it: Electronics engineers like me will learn a lot about reliability of lead-free soldering.