Advances in Thermal Profiling of Reflow Soldering - EPDT Magazine

With today’s more sophisticated electronics market, which calls for more intricate and diverse requirements, together with decreased development cycles and improved capacity, the need to ensure products are produced correctly with the right process control and within tight constraints is ever more important. To guarantee products are soldered correctly and process parameters are met, thermal management is a necessity. To produce electronic assemblies without a known thermal profile is detrimental, as you ‘cannot manage what you do not measure’. Without correct profile management, increases in rework costs may occur and potentially give rise to early field failures. There are three levels of process control which are commonly employed today, all with differing benefits and failures starting with the traditional test board method, through to the advanced automatic profiling systems. Over the years thermal profiling has advanced significantly and now offers exact profiles aiding in the advancement of technology manufacture. We will first look at the traditional manual method.

Traditional profiling devices

The method of passing a profiling device through an oven to ensure the machine is set correctly is an important one, and having a test board to do the initial profile setup is still a fundamental step that needs to be performed. Thermocouples are placed on the crucial components of the board and when passed through the oven measurements are taken to ensure the thermal profile meets the target profile. With the introduction of more complex or smaller fragile assemblies, or when high production volumes of mobile phones and tablet PCs are involved, this is simply not enough. Verification of the oven profile must be performed much more frequently. Using the test board for on-going process checking is error prone, resulting in false alarms or measurement data with poor repeatability or accuracy. The main problem with this method is keeping the test board in good working order. The thermocouple sensors used to establish the profile during the initial set-up stage needs to respond quickly to temperature change and not influence the measurement. The result of this is that they are inherently fragile and need to be frequently replaced which is both time consuming and can result in measurement repeatability problems.

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Advances in Thermal Profiling of Reflow Soldering – EPDT Magazine

Traditional profiling devices

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