Mark Waterman

Mark Waterman has submitted responses to the following questions.

Manual or Automated Assembly?
What a great problem to have! You need to decide if your company is sales organization or a manufacturer. If ...

Seeking Advise for a Solder Reflow Recipe
The short answer is you will need to increase your zone temperatures and/or lengthen the heating time (slowing the conveyor ...

Baking After Cleaning Hand Placed Parts
Moisture sensitivity is only applicable if you will heating (re-heating) the moisture sensitive parts again. If they have been soldered, ...

EMI Shield Reflow Soldering Techniques
Reflow fixtures can be successfully implemented with careful attention paid to thermal mass and airflow (less mass and more air ...

Competing Reflow Oven Zones
Each oven manufacturer should specify the maximum delta between zone temperature set points (usually 40°C-65°C). As for your solder paste, ...

Reflow Oven - 5 Zone or 8 Zone
The answer is that the more zones you have, the more flexibility you have to tailor the reflow profile for ...

Moisture Sensitive Components in Flooded Storage Facility
Depending on the MSL level, they could be baked out. This bake would take dedicated ovens potentially many weeks. This ...

Specific Solder To Control Dendritic Growth
It is not normal that a customer would specify a specific paste, although most customers don't have enough knowledge of ...

Production Floor Temperature and Humidity Loggers
Temperature and humidity can effect ESD, MSD, screen printing, working time, and shelf life. If you don't measure/monitor all the ...

Rechecking Thermal Profiles
The short answer is Yes. After refining the oven recipe to produce the ideal profile, the only way to verify ...

Test Probe Problems After Pin-In-Paste
No clean paste fluxes are designed to encapsulate the solder joint after reflow and protect it from oxidation, moisture, etc.. ...

What is Causing Solder Joint Cracking?
This sounds like intermittent cold solder joints. You should be able to get a more repeatable process from a selective ...

A Generic Reflow Profile
The short term justification is that it saves time (change over and recipe generation), the same way as not performing ...

Reflow Oven Calibration Schedule
Most manufacturing best practices say 1 year as a general guideline, but ultimately this needs to be determined by your ...

Mixing SAC305 and SACX0307 Solder Alloys
Theeffects are unknown because you would really never know the exact alloy you areworking with at any given time. I ...

Cause of Cracking on SOT23 Components
As only some of the parts are cracking, I would measure the thermal profile of both the good and the ...

Test for Flux Penetration
You can use a paper on top of the board that is reactive to your specific flux. This is the ...

Ideal Relative Humidity for Final Assembly
Like most things it is a compromise. Higher humidity increases corrosion (oxidation) and reduces static. Low humidity reduces corrosion, but ...

Lead Free Reflow Oven Zone Count
The number of zones allow for more control of the profile shape, and usually higher production speeds. The minimum number ...

Batch Reflow vs. In-line Reflow
The real concerns here are the heating types, and work flows.What type of heating does it use IR, convection, or ...

Board Spacing During Reflow
Convection reflow requires heated air pass around the board for proper heating. If the boards are run edge to edge, ...

Solder Fillet Peaks
The peak is formed from the solder turning solidus as the tip is being removed. This indicates that the components ...

APEX Trade Show Feedback
In general the mood was cautiously optimistic. Leading indicators and recent trends suggest that the worst is over, but many ...

What Is the Life Span for a Profile Board?
This is dependent on many factors including thermal exposure, substrate material, and even thermocouple attachment method. In general for the ...