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Plasma treatment is an essential step in ensuring the cleanliness of a board to improve wettability and adhesion. Now, the growing complexity of automotive electronics is leading more carmakers to consider using plasma treatment to ensure greater reliability. Nordson MARCH's Jonathan Doan shares the benefits of the process along with some new information regarding the MES3 requirement with Publisher Barry Matties.
Barry Matties: Please start with an overview of Nordson MARCH, Jonathan.
Jonathan Doan: Nordson MARCH makes plasma equipment primarily for the back end in terms of semiconductor applications and PCB manufacturing, medical applications, some automotive and mil/aero. Really, anything that requires plasma treatment for packaging or fabrication.
Matties: How do you fit into the automotive sector?
Doan: What we’re seeing with the automotive customers is an increase in automation requirements for processing their parts. We’re seeing more of our equipment being used to plasma treat their parts in terms of improving the reliability.
Matties: How does plasma treating improve the reliability?
Doan: What we offer is the ability to thoroughly clean the surface. A lot of times, when you do any type of cleaning of the surface, even if you use a chemical, for example, there’s still some residue. It’s microscopic, but that microscopic layer interferes with adhesion or any type of bond. What plasma treatment does is remove that microscopic layer. You get a very clean, smooth surface that helps with adhesion. At the same time, what we can also do is change the surface energy. That could improve properties previously incompatible to be more cooperative with each other.
That’s really where the plasma treatment, in terms of usage, comes into play. You hear stories about electronics in automotives failing early, and that’s where we’re seeing a lot of customers, especially as some of the big providers of automotive electronics are seeing more of their components being used inside cars, with sensors, etc. We’re seeing more of them go to plasma treatment. This is not only from a batch standpoint—where they were using our machines before—but now they’re using an automated machine because they have the new MES3 requirement for automation and tracking to guarantee that if there are any problems from the consumer side later, they can backtrack and figure out exactly which lot and which device went through which process.
Editor's Note: This article originally appeared in the September 2015 issue of The PCB Magazine.
