DAPC Installs New Desmear Line

With the installation of the Occleppo Direct Metalization line, DAPC has also installed a new Occleppo Horizontal Desmear Line. The desmear line is inline with the direct metallization line and improves repeatability.

Before electroless copper can be deposited, the drilled holes have to be desmeared. The main purpose of desmearing is to remove any epoxy-resin that is smeared onto the edges of the inner layer copper pads while drilling. The smear is the result of a hot drill melting the epoxy-resin and spreading it across the hole wall during its up and down motion. The epoxy smear causes poor, and in some cases, non electrical continuity to the inner layers. Poor adhesion of the plated copper to the hole wall is another reason to desmear. In desmearing, the chemicals are designed to remove only the surface smear of resin from the hole wall without removing the wall structure itself.

While desmearing is used for most boards mainly being multilayer boards, some military applications require further trace etchback, requiring the use of the New Plasma Desmear Machine. The Plasma Desmear is used for all Microwave and High Frequency materials like Rogers and Taconic. Plasma Desmearing is designed to remove not only the smeared resin, but also additional resin from the wall structure and the remaining protruding glass fibres.

With the installation of the new horizontal desmear line and the plasma desmearing line, DAPC is equipped to manufacture all types of high quality boards. More on our new Plasma Desmear process to follow.

DAPC Installs New Nickel Controller to Optimize RoHS Requirements

With the European lead free initiative better known as RoHS coming into effect on July 1, 2006, DAPC has seen a steady increase in demand for printed circuit boards with alternative surface finishes. An excellent alternative to HASL lead finish is electroless gold. Gold is a superb conductor and since it doesn’t corrode, it keeps its excellent solderability characteristics for a very long time and it has a much longer shelf life.

A smooth and uniformly thick gold surface requires a similar nickel substrate bond. To ensure a smooth and uniform gold surface every time, DAPC has installed a Uyemura Starline-dash nickel controller. The nickel controller is a bath stabilizer that analyzes the component levels in the bath on a minute by minute basis, adding any of the seven components to the bath as required to ensure that there is a uniform deposition rate of nickel over the period the board is in the bath.

By using the Starline controller, considerable analytical time in the lab is saved as the bath previously had to be analyzed several times a shift. A further benefit of the controllers use is that its’ precise control of the bath permits it to be operated at a lower temperature thus increasing chemical stability and lifespan.

The electroless nickel/gold line can now be run around the clock as the controller is constantly monitoring the process. The end result is a higher quality PCB with faster delivery times.

DAPC is Now Able to Drill 4.0 mil Holes

At DAPC we believe that the best technology direction is the one that will allow us to fabricate the boards that the customers have not asked us for yet. Case in point: When we started getting orders for boards with 6.0 mil holes, we started to learn how to drill 4.0 mil holes.

Drilling holes this small, finer than a human hair, is no easy task and proved to be a challenge. This challenge was ably taken on by Drilling Supervisor, Darlene Appleton and her drill staff. Darlene has twenty years of experience drilling circuit boards, and is DAPC’s go to person for drilling issues.

Darlene worked with Pluritec to choose the best machines to drill on and how to get thebest speeds out of her spindles for 6.0 and 4.0 mil holes. She worked with the maintenance department, suggesting improvements in the preventative maintenance schedule and establishing new run out tolerances for the machines.

Finally, she applied her own considerable skills as a driller to test drill the first panels, verify the hole quality and refine the procedure.

The ability to drill this fine, will allow DAPC to take full technological advantage of the new Occleppo desmearing and direct metallization lines.

DAPC Installs Two New Post Etch Punches
Increased Yield and Registration

As part of DAPC commitment to investing in new equipment to optimize production and delivery capabilities, DAPC recently purchased two new Multiline Post Etch Punches. These new punches present a higher level of accuracy than the existing machines. Each panel core is punched to provide highly precise tooling holes for stack up and drilling.

While these punches may look the same as our original punches, they now have a more sophisticated vision system with tighter measurement tolerances for the targets. This means that they will accept less error in the size of the registration targets and will reject more over or under etched layers than the old ones did, resulting in even better registration overall than before and, more consistent pad sizes through all the layers in the stack.

Post etch punching provides layer to layer registration of multilayer inner layers prior to laminating. All inner layers are registered and punched via targets precisely located on the layer. Because all types of inner layer layers expand and contract slightly at different rates due to temperature and humidity, no two layers in any given board are ever precisely the same size. The punches measure this variation and refuse to punch any layers who size is outside the specified tolerance. They optimize the location of the punched holes to create the best possible layer to layer registration. Hence, very close registration of the inner layers can be achieved, which leads to better internal connections in the through holes and vias and faster throughput due to yield improvements and higher quality levels from tighter layer registration.

DAPC installs new Jet Scrubber

Oven Upgrades done at DAPC

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