Investigating Analytical Tools for Testing Cleanliness with Foresite's Eric Camden

Estimated reading time: 23 minutes

But we can say in general that someone is using the right material, using the right process, the right equipment and parameters. In the end it says okay this board appears to be exactly what it needs to be in terms of reliability because you've got low levels of ionics. Your PC fab looks like a good piece of material. Your components are clean as they come in the door. So those kinds of things, and again because what we do here in the electronics industry is such an additive process you've got suppliers sending in 20 different types of materials that you're putting on one card. Once you marry all these things together now your resultant cleanliness is coming from all those different suppliers, not just what you're doing.

Goldman: It's complicated.

Camden: It can be very complicated.

Goldman: And I take it you may perform an audit function in part, right?

Camden: That is correct. It's really a function of what we do every day just by looking at someone's process or someone's product because we're looking at how their equipment and how their parameters handle that set of materials. In one sense that is an audit, but an onsite process audit is also something that Foresite offers. I'll get on a plane, go halfway around the world and put my head under your machine because I want to look at your equipment, and your operators, and I want to see how they're doing things by hand. Humans are one of the worst things possible in terms of reliability. Because you can't calibrate one next to the other and repeatability is key in this business at fixing problems. It really goes a long way into optimizing your process. It can be considered an audit in a couple different senses of that word.

Goldman: And you're also a troubleshooter.

Camden: Very much so. Because if you bring me a product that has failed, we're going to use our techniques to determine what the root cause of that was and then we'll take that information and we'll go back to the assembly house and say, "Okay, it was part of this process that caused the failure so let's see…was it your parameters themselves, was it the equipment not functioning as you thought it was?" And we help better determine how to optimize those processes. We troubleshoot the process based on the analytical findings and then we're able to optimize that to where that failure doesn't occur anymore.

Goldman: That's good. What is the history of your company?

Camden: Terry Munson is our president and founder. He founded the company 26 years ago and I've been there for 18 years as of January. I've done a lot in 18 years. It's remarkable that, after 18 years, we're still dealing with a lot of the same basic problems when it comes to manufacturing. And that's being able to properly process a no-clean flux or completely remove a flux residue or understand how these things interplay with one another in terms of reliability at the end. After 3,000 some customers and doing this for 26 years you tend to see most of it. I would never say we've seen it all because every now and then we are surprised, but being in the position that we are, we see so many different failure modes.

It really helps us with our new customers going forward. They say, "We've got this problem we've never seen this before." Well, we've dealt with that 50 times now. We're able to kind of fast track some of these things. We're not just poking in the dark like you must do sometimes on an unknown failure mode. We're able to take our experience and our knowledge and really laser focus in on what should be the issue. And obviously it's not going to be 100%, but most of the time we find that what we've seen with other customers we're able to fine tune that analysis and focus down to one or two different things.

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