A novel placement method for mini-scale passive components in surface mount technology

This paper aims to propose a novel placing method, i.e., place-between-paste-and-pad (PB), for mini-scale passive components to enhance electronic assembly lines’ yield. PB means a component is designed to be placed at the midpoint between the pastes and pads on the length direction while it aligns with the pads’ center on the width direction. An experiment that involves 12 printed circuit boards (PCB) and 4500 resistors R0402M (0.40 mm × 0.20 mm) is designed and conducted to get comparative results of PB and two industrial placing methods, i.e., place-on-pad and place-on-paste. Based on this experiment’s results, PB outperforms the other two methods in terms of minimizing the components’ final misalignment. Furthermore, PB is a low-cost placing strategy because PB does not need the real-time communication between the solder paste inspection machine and the pick-and-place machine. The placement method proposed in this study is expected to offer a low-cost exploration in the pick-and-place procedure to enhance the surface mount assembly quality of mini-scale passive components.