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Change Your DAM Thinking: DAM Registration

In last month’s column, How Can You Predict Your Company’s DAM Future?, I discussed the bad behaviors that block progress in understanding PCB registration. Once data and discovery overtake people’s opinions and their need to be right, progress can be made. Today, PCB registration isn’t the problem it once was. However, we have left the understanding of registration in the hands of a few specialists. This is a mistake. Registration is fundamental to making a board. It is still a major contributor to scrap from internal shorts. It defines our level of technology capability and is part of any OEM’s future technology roadmap. If we don’t understand registration the way we need to, then we are blind to some powerful opportunities to improve our business operations.

Registration can be absolutely understood. There are three registration error modes: offset, scaling, and rotation. Let’s look at the offset errors first, since they are the easiest to understand.Read the full column here.

This column originally appeared in the February 2013 issue of The PCB Magazine.