Institute of Circuit Technology 41st Annual Symposium

Estimated reading time: 12 minutes

Ventec Europe Technical Support Manager Ian Mayoh, explained “what the FOD was going on,” FOD being ‘foreign object damage.’ Having started by illustrating some extreme examples of aviation disasters, he focused on the growing awareness of foreign object damage in electronic devices, particularly in ultra-high-reliability applications, where critical failure could result in loss of life or have extreme cost implications. In the case of multilayer laminates, particularly in cores less than 50 microns thick, the avoidance of FOD was becoming increasingly critical and he referred to recent proposals by the European Space Agency to add an appendix on laminate cleanliness to the IPC-4101-D specification. Mayoh went on to explain the steps that Ventec had taken to establish a clean, quality-driven culture at all stages of their AS9100C-accredited integrated supply chain, from raw materials, resin processing and prepreg treating, layup and lamination, all the way through their fabrication and distribution operations. The company’s fundamental policy was to manufacture quality into their products, rather than to inspect defects out, and as result of their investments and procedures they were now able to mass-produce dielectric layers of 30 microns and below to enable customers to build HDI constructions with full confidence in the cleanliness of the material.

Final speaker of the day was Dr. Emma Goosey from MTG Research, with an update on the Sustainable Treatment of Waste Using Recycled Chitosans (STOWURC) project. The requirement to remove low levels of metal pollutants such as copper and nickel from PCB manufacturing effluent could be achieved using ion exchange resins, but an alternative was to use waste natural products and it had been observed that chitin, present in crab shells, could absorb these metals. Disposal of crab shell waste from the food industry was expensive and subject to various legislation, so to use the waste from one industry to treat waste from another industry and to recover potentially valuable metals was an attractive proposition. Dr. Goosey described how crab shells were prepared for use by first crushing and demineralising, then treating with alkali to convert chitin to chitosan, which was a more efficient absorbant, by de-acetylation. The resulting material had been shown to give consistent fast uptake of copper and a high rate of recovery from actual PCB manufacturing effluent. Ultimately, it was found that the copper could be desorbed into sulphuric acid to give an electroplating solution from which metallic copper could be recovered galvanically, and the metal-free chitosan could then be reused. 

The Institute of Circuit Technology continues to grow its membership, and the Annual Symposium is a major occasion that attracts most of the leading names and faces of the UK PCB industry. This year’s event was not only a platform for exchange of knowledge and ideas, but another great opportunity for building networks and collaborative relationships.

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