Taguchi experiment to design for low cost, high reliability surface mounted components

Electronics customers throughout the world are demanding that costs decrease and that performance increases. New technologies are emerging to answer these demands but are usually filled with new problems. Past solutions attempted to control processes by creating tighter specifications. This methodology has led to greater expense and needs to be improved upon. Surface mount technology (SMT) has emerged to increase the packaging density and decrease the cost of printed wiring assemblies. The design, manufacture, and operations of SMT assemblies make up a highly coupled system with significant ill-understood interactions. At present, Northrop Electronics Systems Division is using robust design techniques to make designs inherently less sensitive to interaction of raw materials, manufacturing methods, and operating environment variations. A concurrent engineering approach was used to design the solution to the problem. A team of representatives from circuit board design, manufacturing and quality organizations brainstormed possible control variables and defined the measurement (reliability) to be used in the experiment.<>