The behaviour of solder pastes in stencil printing with electropolishing process

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to study the effect of the electropolishing time of stencil manufacturing parameters and solder‐mask definition methods of PCB pad design parameters on the performance of solder paste stencil printing process for the assembly of 01005 chip components.Design/methodology/approach – During the study, two types of stencils were manufactured for the evaluations: electroformed stencils and electropolished laser‐cut stencils. The electroformed stencils were manufactured using the standard electroforming process and their use in the paste printing process was compared against the use of an electropolished laser‐cut stencil. The electropolishing performance of the laser‐cut stencil was evaluated twice at the following intervals: 100 s and 200 s. The performance of the laser‐cut stencil was also evaluated without electropolishing. An optimized process was established after the polished stencil apertures of the laser‐cut stencil were inspected. The performance evaluations were ...