Additive Reality

July 11, 2022

Additive Reality: Drop It, and Enjoy the Greenback

The columns so far have brought up the technical aspects of inkjet solder mask and made readers more familiar with this technology. This last column instead will show how the technical aspects match the commercial ones. It will start by introducing the main change in the manufacturing compromise and then the general details on payback period. Presently, traditional solder mask has been a balance between accuracy and throughput. Inkjet brings one more dimension: the copper thickness. A single print coating process by inkjet can handle thick or thin copper, in other words, the same inkjet tool is able to coat this thicker copper with fidelity to narrow features, fast, or a compromise between the two.

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May 04, 2022

Additive Reality: Let's Drop a Line About PCB Cross Section

My article in the April 2022 issue of Design007 Magazine, titled “Additive Manufacturing Requires Additive Design Techniques,” presented several cross sections of solder mask coated with an inkjet technology. However, the choice of the cut’s location, and therefore the highlight of the picture, is slightly different from the usual dam or copper edge coverage. This illustrated my point and most structures of solder mask showed in the figures would not be anything new to my readers. Several articles have explained lateral definition and stacking principles.

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March 28, 2022

Additive Reality: Drop-forging Solder Mask Thickness With Inkjet

Traditional coating processes for solder mask handle thickness as a single parameter for the whole board. There will be differences between the amount of material on the laminate or on the copper, and these will depend on the height of the copper and in some cases on the section of the copper feature. Overall, it is reproducible: It looks homogeneously green and is easy to estimate its amount of material consumption. Therefore, everybody is happy.

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February 16, 2022

Additive Reality: Isolated Raindrops Announce the Storm

It is an early January evening after office hours. Despite my best New Year’s intentions of striking a good balance between work and personal life, when I hear the ding of an incoming email, I decide to check it anyway. It’s a message from the U.S., where Don Monn of Taiyo has just given his view on the inkjet market. Something he says immediately strikes a chord, “What I can tell you is … there are well over 20 installations … between North America and Europe. There are another five or six already committed to be installed in the first quarter of 2022.” But his numbers don't immediately add up for me.

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January 19, 2022

Additive Reality: Green Drops, White Drops or Both: Do Solder Mask and Legend Make a Good Team?

The combination of solder mask printing and legend printing seems an obvious and attractive solution, like bringing chocolate and vanilla together. Still, the gain would rely on obtaining both functionalities without adding complexity. However, from the summary consideration of my last column on the equipment construction, two separate printhead arrays would match best the different requirements of legend and solder mask. In this column the story continues.

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December 08, 2021

Additive Reality: A Report From 2021 (Drop)tronica

After months of social distancing, productronica brought people and ideas together in a single place. Its most pragmatic demonstrations were the tools on the floor of the B3 Hall at the München Messe. The fair had representations for almost all equipment needed for PCB manufacturing and inspection. Three of these tools were solder mask inkjet printers from different brands, as was the case in 2019—a sign that business has continued, albeit a slow pace, through the pandemic period. However, this year there was another vibe, this time about additive manufacturing. At the entrance, an animation on a giant screen showed how a company is delivering a bottom-up approach for PCB prototyping—an inspiring manufacturing frontier at the doors.

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November 29, 2021

Additive Reality: Your Company Drops Open the Inkjet Printer Box, Now What?

The moment will come when some of you readers will advance from interest to complete involvement with the technology. This will be a fun ride as you will experience first-hand the concepts seen so far in this column. However, we all know that any reliable technology relies on one healthy, not so exciting, good habit: preventive maintenance. Preventive maintenance and incidental repairs are not the same, though they might follow the same instructions. Still, this does not mean that these are interchangeable.

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October 17, 2021

Additive Reality: Drop Your (Solder) Mask, It's Sampling Time

Inkjet printing equipment around the world is printing solder mask on PCB half fabricates. This effort goes under the name of “sampling.” Major PCB manufacturers have been asking either equipment or material suppliers (or both) to provide a solder mask coated sample with inkjet technology to make cross comparisons.

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September 26, 2021

Additive Reality: Solder Mask Patterning at the Edge Between Drops and Bricks

The digital form of the inkjet printing technology goes through files containing a rasterized image; these bitmaps, in their simplest form, contain information about presence (or absence) of drops. Additionally, the resolution brings in the drops pitch.

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August 17, 2021

Additive Reality: Printhead Selection or ‘Shop ‘Til You Drop’

If inkjet tools could be found on an e-commerce site, there would be several product specifications of which many would specify the jetting properties; these would basically detail the printhead(s) in the system.

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July 16, 2021

Additive Reality: Drops of Technology

The solder mask application revolves around solder mask material. Still, not all the attention should focus on the material alone. The inkjet printed solder mask layer will be made of a collection of drops and next to the solder mask ink a few other materials play a role in the shaping of these drops.

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June 20, 2021

Additive Reality: Drop Placement Accuracy

New columnist Luca Gautero takes a clever engineering spin on William Tell and the apple and how it relates to inkjet equipment for solder mask coating.

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