Electronic – What stages do PCB mass-assembly techniques come in

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There's a spectrum of how you get PCBs assembled.

1) Have a human pick out all the parts, solder them all on by hand, and check them all by eye. Low cost of entry. Good for low-volume high-mix work. Surface mount is difficult/impossible, depending on the package.

N) A pick-and-place machine, wave soldering, and automated optical verification. Very expensive equipment. Only cost-effective at high volumes, 100+ at least. Through-hole is difficult/impossible for some pick-and-place machines.

What's in between? Reflow ovens? Automated solder paste dispensers? Some sort of automated part dispensing system that's between a wall full of bins and a pick-and-place machine? Stuff I haven't imagined?

The bigger question is this: what steps can be taken to increase the efficiency of an entirely hand-solder operation? In what stages can such an operation make the transition from all hand-soldered to fully automated production? And what is the cost range on the equipment involved?

Best Answer

You certainly can hand-solder down to "0402" parts with strand solder and a suitably narrow chisel bit: apply flux, place part, get a pad-sized bead of solder on the iron, apply to one end of part while holding part with tweezers, dab more solder on iron, do the other end.

A head-mounted magnifier will help you see what you're doing at that scale.

The next stage of neatness is to hand-apply solder paste to the pads before putting the parts on. The paste is slightly sticky and includes flux, so you get better joints and less risk of the part pinging off never to be seen again.

If your run is more than a few, get a solder paste mask made which turns applying paste into a single action: align a panel of PCBs, wipe paste across, remove.

Once you're using paste you can consider reflow. Reflowing both sides (one after the other, not both at once!) can be fiddly as you need to make sure the components on the bottom don't fall off.

The next stage is to go pick-and-place; there are people doing cottage-industry or homebrew pick-and-place, sometimes with secondhand equipment. The actual soldering is still pastemask and reflow oven.

The final stage is to buy the fully automated line as a single unit: boards go in one end, component reels in the side, finished boards come out the end with automatic inspection. Worth it if you can keep it busy.

I've also seen partial wave soldering used to add TH parts to SMT boards. This involved extra production jigs to hold the TH parts in place and shield areas of the board from wave soldering.