An Digitized Solution Comes to Ease Stencil Inspection

1. An Digitized Solution Comes to Ease Stencil Inspection Very interesting! Solder paste stencil is quite cheap, but it is core process step for PCB assembly (SMT) since more than 70% quality problems are from screen printing process. Stencil process engineers should be quite familiar with stencil inspection. Every time after stencil manufacturers returned stencil design file, process engineers are required to verify the stencil file before entering into production. The whole process can last for only half an hour or up to one day for those complicated product.

2. The process is time-consuming, though, it is indispensable to avoid stencil design issues due to misunderstanding of stencil requirements, which could hugely impact production. Currently, a great part of process engineers are using Gerber Viewer software to check the .GBX file returned by stencil manufacturers and inspecting stencil opening manually, which: hardly recognize some tiny deviations; is impossible to verify all the openings; would cost too much time for inspection of safe distance, step thickened area, etc.; would increase the inspection difficulties for those complicated

3. product. Obviously, it's a great challenge for engineers to manually inspect a stencil with thousands of openings. Even for an experienced engineer with utmost care, omissions would occur inevitably. If the opening issues are overlooked, manufacturing enterprises will be greatly impacted, and loss can range from customer complaints and rework to compensation and even loss of customers. So far, we have understood how important the stencil inspection is, while on the other hand, stencil inspection of complicated product is still a great challenge for engineers. What should we do? Now the Industry 4.0 has been the leading trend for PCB/PCBA manufacturing industry. Every enterprise who wants to take the lead must follow the step of intelligent manufacturing and turn away from the conventional low-efficiency approaches. To cope with the issue, what you need is an intelligent software solution. The NPI software solution specialist, Vayo Technology, has developed a stencil designer software to digitize the management of stencil know-how. Then does it pay off in

4. Stencil inspection? Yes. Vayo-Stencil Designer software has integrated powerful opening checking rules library, through which the verification could be completed by one click. Pic.2 Rule Library For example, as shown in the picture below, if by traditional manual inspection approach, it’s difficult to find out the poor design caused by improper part layout, while the software could manage it easily.

5. Pic.3 Check rules method Besides check rules method, Vayo-Stencil Designer provides another more advanced verification method, which is to compare the outsourced stencil with the enterprise-owned digital stencil aperture library to find out the difference. Thereinto Vayo-Stencil Designer allows users to create their

6. own stencil aperture library. Within hours, users shall digitize their product and process know-how, and own a powerful knowledge base. Pic.4 Aperture comparison method What’s more, users are allowed to export Comparison Report, which shall greatly ease the communication with stencil manufactures, thus avoiding bias in requirements understanding and improving communication efficiency.

7. Pic.5 Comparison Report Visit us on https://www.vayoinfo.com/en/stencil-design-automation/ to learn more details or you can connect us via: business@vayoinfo.com