A Thin Film Solder Mask for Assembling SMT Boards with Tented Via Holes

New technologies bring new challenges to those who have to convert hand‐made prototype printed circuit boards into a robust, reliable, large volume manufacturing technique. The adoption by many electronic equipment producers of surface mount technology has demanded that production managers develop and understand new skills to increase yields and obtain the maximum reliability from the product. This paper describes in some detail the methods used, many of them empirical, to obtain the best performance. Of specific interest is the importance of selecting the optimum solder mask system to increase yields and provide reliability, and the reasons for selecting a high conformance thin film solder mask are discussed. Each process is examined step‐by‐step to highlight the pitfalls, suggestions are made as to how these can be overcome and the paper concludes with the author's view of how the new technology will evolve in the future—to present further challenges to the manufacturing processes.