2005 was a positive year for the electronics manufacturing industry. Saturn followed suit, posting year over year sales growth of 18%! We credit this growth to our continued focus on improving our quality and capabilities. This month’s newsletter will detail new technologies we have begun offering in 2005 as well as the major process and capabilities improvements we have made.

2005 marks a record year for Saturn in with regard to growth in capabilities. We have invested over $1 million (of Nagji & Perry’s dough) this past year strictly for the purpose of improving our quality and capabilities.

The primary side effect of these investments is that we get to have a lot more fun!

As a result of these investments, we now offer production quantity services for the following technologies (and combinations thereof):

4 mil lines / spaces
20+ layers
6 mil drilled holes (including high temp materials)
5% controlled impedance
Via in Pad Technology
Cavity Boards / Exposed Inner Layers
Blind Vias w/ 3 mil annular rings
Full Body Deep Gold / Selective Gold
Heavy Copper Multilayer– RoHS Compliant
Hybrid Materials (including PTFE based materials)

For more detailed information on our improvements, please visit www.saturnelectronics.com/newsletters.htm for the expanded version of this newsletter. We’ll take you on a “walk” through the shop and review the changes we’ve made. Hope to see you there!

Enterprise Resource Planning

Over the past few years, we have adapted to the new era of manufacturing as our industry has shifted from low mix, high volume towards high mix low volume by expanding our product offerings. However, our front-end systems have not followed suit. As a result, we have on occasion been late on deliveries due to material shortages, poor production scheduling, and incorrect process flow procedures.

To resolve this, we purchased the MAS 500 software package from Sage Software Group. This powerful software package will link our accounting, sales entry, production planning, and shipping systems together. This represents an investment of over $125,000. Thankfully, Nagji survived the heart attack he had when he found out all you get for this is a CD.

Registration

We invested $60,000 to purchase the PerfecTest software system (www.perfectest.com). This is the most expensive desk purchased in Saturn’s history.

Seriously, though, this software and testing system provides valuable information regarding material scaling and process registration impact. At the end of the day, the results are higher yields and increased reliability of higher layer count products. Please contact your local salesperson for a complete report detailing our registration improvement program.

Multilayer Lamination

As our customers’ needs have shifted towards higher layer counts and more multilayer applications, we have followed suit by purchasing a second multilayer lamination system. To compliment our current OEM electric press, we purchased a Lauffer hot-oil vacuum lamination press capable of uniform platen temperatures in excess of 500 degrees.

March Plasma Treatment System

In January we brought on-line our new March Plasma treatment system. This system uses mixed gases in plasma state to treat PCB materials. Plasma technology can deliver higher uniformity and reproducibility than chemical or mechanical processes. Plasma treatment increases the surface energy of advanced materials, including Teflon®, providing excellent lamination and wettability for plating through-holes. Plasma also removes resin smear created in the drilling process and removes carbon by-products from laser-drilled blind micro-vias. This machine represents an investment of approximately $120,000. Hey, at least it’s big and heavy. 

Drilling

During 2005, our drill room went through the most comprehensive renovation in Saturn’s history. In 2004, our drill room consisted of 12 Excellon Mark VI and 2 Excellon Century 2001 drilling machines. While the Mark VI is a solid drilling machine, it does not have the capabilities required to drilled high quality microvias that are diameter 12 mils or less. The primary capabilities that contribute to microvia quality are higher spindle RPM and controlled-depth drilling capability. During 2005, we added 3 Excellon Concept 4 and 2 Excellon Century 2001 drilling machines. These machines have up to 125,000 RPM spindles and controlled depth drilling capabilities with a Z-axis tolerance of +/- .002”. These machines represent a combined investment of over $250,000.

Laser Drilling / Routing

We purchased an Excellon LVD Cobra Hybrid laser driller. This machine comes equipped with both CO2 and UV / Yag lasers. Having this hybrid setup allows us to go beyond producing laser drilled microvias down to 2 mils. Additional product offerings include, but are not limited to:

Flex routing
Controlled depth routing to sub-5 mil cavities
Tight tolerance routing
Soldermask opening
Stacked Vias
The imagination is the limit!!!

Plating

We made two primary revisions to our plating line to achieve two specific results.

First, we installed vibration units on both plating lines. Vibrating PCB production panels while in the plating line helps to rid small holes of entrapped air. Entrapped air within microvias can prevent copper plating from covering the entire hole wall.

The other primary revision we made to our plating line is the transition to high throw copper plating. High throw copper plating is a substitute for reverse pulse plating for high aspect ratio hole plating. Aspect ratio is calculated by dividing the total thickness of the PCB by the drilled hole diameter. High throw plating requires a longer plating cycle, but results in a more balanced surface to hole plating ratio. Both lines have been set up to plate 10:1 aspect ratio on 12 mil holes as a standard.

Soldermask

We installed an Argus LPI spray coater and continue to evaluate sprayable soldermasks. This offers us an alternative to our standard squeegee application. The benefits of spraying soldermask include more uniform thickness, increase productivity, and enhanced resolution on fine pitch technology products.

Lead Free HASL

We purchased and installed a fully retro-fitted Lantronix TT30 hot air solder leveling (HASL) system. This HASL system is unique in that it holds panels at a 45% angle to the air knives. This allows this process to be used on finer pitch applications as solder shorting is minimized.

Please visit www.acs-tech.com for more information on this machine.

In conjunction with this machine installation, we also implemented the use of a lead-free solder alloy, Tin-Nickel-Copper (SnNiCu). We have chosen Florida Cirtech’s SN100CL alloy as it is licensed from Nihon Superior. Nihon Superior has more than 3 years successful field experience with this alloy in Japan and we expect to have similar success in North America. Please visit www.floridacirtech.com for more information.

Routing / Fabrication

We installed 2 Mark VI routing machines in the routing department, increasing our capacity by 50%. Further, we added one more depth controlled routing spindle to our machines, doubling our capacity to perform this function.