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VOLUME 28 - NUMBER 1 Product Preview: APEX & MD&M THE GLOBAL HI-TECH ELECTRONICS PUBLICATION Traceability: All-Important for OEMs By W. Scott Fillebrown, President and CEO, ACD, and Francois Monette, Co-President of Cogiscan Inc. T
Kyzen's engineered aqueous cleaner works on many kinds of soils, and is one of many products in this month's Prod- uct Preview section that starts on. . .
Page 80 Flooded EMS
Provider BAE Gets Helping Hand
Flood devastated BAE Sys- tems' in Upstate New York got a special helping hand from Europlacer to get the company back in full production in record time.
Page 18 Packaging
Assembly and
This Month's Focus:
Different approaches to selec- tive soldering, a new look at vapor phase reflow, highly ver- satile autoplacers with quick changeover, a better way to re- flow miniature portable device circuits.
Page 56
Highly complex PCBs must be tracked during all assembly operations
Newly Discovered Quantum Spin Liquid
By Chad Boutin, NIST
Gaithersburg, MD — A research team including scientists from the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) has confirmed long-standing suspicions among physicists that elec- trons in a crystalline structure called a kagome (kah-go-may) lattice can form a “spin liquid,” a novel quantum state of matter in which the electrons’ mag- netic orientation remains in a constant state of change. (T.H. Han, J.S. Helton, S. Chu, D.G. Nocera, J.A. Rodriguez- Rivera, C. Broholm and Y.S. Lee. “Fractionalized excitations in the spin
liquid state of a kagome lattice antifer- romagnet”; Nature, 492, Dec. 20, 2012, doi: 10.1038/nature11659.) The research shows that a spin
liquid state exists in Herbertsmithite — a mineral whose atoms form a kagome lattice, named for a simple weaving pattern of repeating triangles well-known in Japan. Kagome lattices are one of the simplest structures be- lieved to possess a spin liquid state, and the new findings, revealed by neu- tron scattering, indeed show striking evidence for a fundamental prediction of spin liquid physics.
Magnetic Spin Generally, magnetism results
from the magnetic moment, also called spin, of electrons within atoms. Rather than aligning in a sta- ble, repetitive up-down pattern as they do in most magnetic solids at low temperatures, the electrons in a spin liquid are frustrated by mutual interactions from settling into a per-
Continued on page 8
raceability should be required when an OEM chooses an EMS provider. Without traceability,
there is no real way to perform a thorough defect analysis. In some in- stances a defect may appear to be an assembly issue, but once a date/lot code comparison across all affected
serial numbers is performed, a pat- tern of date/lot codes appears, show- ing that it actually is not an assem- bly issue. An example of this may be that the de-wetting on solder joints turns out to be the result of a bad al- loy on the leads themselves as op- posed to a bad board or bad solder
from the EMS provider. As complexi- ty increases, the need for traceability also increases. The more complex the compo-
nent, the more likely that a recall will occur from the component manu- facturer. Without traceability, there is no easy way to locate and recall the affected product. Traceability is more than just a component issue. When properly implemented, it includes the answers to “the four Ws”: Who, What happened, Where, and When. This means that there is a record of who did the work, what machine was used to do the work, where and when the work was done, as well as the outcome. With that information, it becomes easy to create a perform- ance cross-reference chart to track
Continued on page 19
Training Comes first at STI
By the Staff of STI Electronics, Inc.
“Yes” to all three questions for Madi- son, Alabama-based STI Electronics, Inc., a family-owned company that started out as a training and consult- ing firm. Founded by Jim D. Raby,
I
s it a contract manufacturer? Is it a school and certification facility? Is it a distributor? The answer is
February, 2013
Manufacturing is one of the three divisions at STI.
P.E. in 1982, the company’s roots were in training and consulting but quickly expanded to include training materials and analytical lab services. Today, STI is comprised of three
divisions with multiple departments within each. The company teaches and certifies to the IPC and NASA
Continued on page 22
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