Soldering has been a key process step in the manufacture of electronic assemblies since the earliest days of the electronics industry, it is also one of the most challenging processes to control and predict and a major source of defects and failure. For several years, the elimination of solder from the electronic circuit assembly manufacturing process has been suggested as a potential way to sidestep solder technology’s many shortcomings. Elimination of solder can in fact be relatively easily accomplished by simply reversing the manufacturing process. That is, rather than building printed circuits and then placing components and soldering to them together, it is here proposed that boards containing components, with the component’s planar terminations exposed on the surfaces of said component boards, have circuits applied to them using PCB build up technologies which are now well established in the PCB industry. By bypassing the soldering process, the resulting assemblies offer significant benefits and improvement potential in terms of cost, reliability, security and environmental friendliness among others.
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