Cleaning & Contamination Defect Guide

Cleaning & Contamination Defect Guide

We hope that you find the “Cleaning & Contamination Defect Guide” a useful and informative reference for recognizing and solving problems within your manufacturing or suppliers process. The defects included in the guide are fairly common process issues or failure modes that engineers in the industry have experienced over the years.

This guide is a live document that will be updated on an ongoing basis, with the latest edition being made available in print and as an online interactive edition. I have been involved in training, process development and disseminating information regarding printed board manufacture and assembly for many years. I have had the pleasure of writing for Global SMT magazine since the first issue.

It’s a pleasure to launch this publication at the first NPL/IPC Cleaning and Contamination Testing Center held at IPC APEX Expo. As we in the industry have seen, the defects encountered during and after implementation of new design and, in recent years lead-free soldering have brought us a variety of new and, in some cases, old challenges.

This guide is a compilation of defects associated with clean and no clean processes designed to help managers, designers, engineers and operatives to solve these everyday problems and to let them troubleshoot effectively and efficiently. We hope you find this a useful guide and that it helps you achieve your objective.

INSIDE THIS GUIDE

• Copper Dendrites/ Surface Corrosion
• Cleaning Under QFN
• Mask De-wetting or Poor Adhesion
• Corrosion Dendrite Formation
• Flux Residue Testing
• No Clean Flux Residues
• Dendrites/Surface Corrosion
• Dross or Oxide Short
• Stranded Wire Corrosion
• Solder Wicking
• White Residues
• Poor Stencil
• Aperture Cleaning
• Pin In Hole Reflow Residues
• Component Process Compatibility
• Contamination and Finger Prints
• Gold Tab Contamination
• Solder Spots
• Conformal Coating Failure
• Cleaning Debate

PLUS

• NPL Online Defect Database
• NPL Cleaning Related Reports and Good Practice Guides
• IPC Cleaning Standards and User Guides