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Quest for Reliability: Artificial Reliability Over Intelligence

As the industry begins to shift from standard design tools to artificial intelligence (AI), reliability might be overlooked in an effort to build “smarter.” Over the last few years, the desire to manufacture anything and everything for less has included removing humans from as many positions as possible. There are a couple of viewpoints, and I can see positives in both.

When you remove the human error rate from inspecting things like solder deposition or part placement accuracy, productivity and throughput can greatly increase. We have been using equipment with machine perception (think AOI, or automated optical inspection) with great success for years. Where judgment calls are important, automation isn’t always the answer; actual intelligence and experience are required to determine if things like flux and other processing residues are present. Even more important is the decision of what to do with those residues to determine if they pose a risk to your product’s reliability.

I have seen solder paste inspection equipment at contract manufacturers (CMs) that look at millions of pads each day that will catalog any locations that it can’t fully determine if the paste is sufficient or not; then, a human needs to accept or reject that PCBA based on visual inspection experience. Paste printing is a starting point for reliability that has not been completely taken over by AI yet, and that is a good thing. The same can be said for AOI after SMT reflow. Keep in mind this is all contingent on the operators being properly trained for the pass/fail visual criteria making that call.

To read this entire column, which appeared in the October 2019 issue of SMT007 Magazine, click here.