IPC releases IPC-9850A, surface mount placement characterisation
09 January 2012
As EMS companies have ramped up speeds to meet the high demand for electronics, equipment manufacturers have responded by developing machines that quickly shift from handling one package style to another with fewer sacrifices in precision.
To help industry determine the best equipment set-up to meet needs for speed, capability and accuracy, IPC has released revision A to IPC-9850, Surface Mount Placement Characterisation, making it simpler to quantify the performance of placement equipment.
“This standard lets you look at totally different types of machines and get a better comparison for how they will each work in your environment,” said Michael Cieslinski, Senior Engineer with Panasonic Factory Solution Company of America, and chair of the IPC SMT Component Placement Equipment Subcommittee that updated IPC-9850.
The comparison shows how machine speeds change as accuracy requirements rise. The evaluations are performed by placement of test components on test boards that are specified in the standard. These boards have five different types of component parts with various quantities of each.
According to Kris Roberson, IPC manager of assembly technology (pictured), if a customer wants to compare two different placement equipment vendors, IPC-9850A will allow a truer comparison in placement speed and capability.
IPC-9850A now complies with common methodologies for measurement system analysis (MSA) and is compatible with the approach used by ASQ and other groups. The new method calculates the expanded measurement uncertainty (EMU) which combines all the measurement uncertainty of the system. The individual factors included in the EMU are gauge repeatability and reproducibility (GR&R) variance, non-linearity, resolution, hysteresis, and artifact uncertainty.
Calculating the EMU is a more stringent test of measurement capability since it adds many additional factors that were not calculated in the original IPC-9850 GRR and accuracy report, while keeping the same passing process to tolerance ratio of less than 25%.
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