Printed Circuit Board Through Hole Inspection
Quality control in Printed Circuit Boards is important to ensure the reliability of the final product. Significant value is added to the boards through the manufacturing process, and so rapid assessment of the boards after each stage or immediately after final production is vital to ensure any problems are captured and resolved quickly.
Quality checks on the plated holes to which components will be attached are extremely important to assessing the reliability of the product, especially for Aerospace applications. Test samples are often built into the board, so that they experience identical manufacturing steps as the component being produced, but can be readily removed and tested.
Assessment of these plated holes require grinding accurately to the center of the hole diameter, so that the quality of drilling and plating operations can be inspected. The PC-Met and PWB-Met fixtures are designed to do this.
When using the PC-Met or the PWB-Met, a pre-defined distance is accurately ground off mounted specimen. Alignment holes are manufactured into the test coupons a known distance from the features of interest. The grinding distance is accurately controlled by the PC-Met or the PWB-Met to allow the user to grind accurately and quickly to exactly the right place.
In the standard equipment, this distance is set to 0.150” as shown in the diagram. The perfect target is reached by grinding to diamond stops in the fixture.
More information on the equipment and consumables are available from your local sales representative. A video to show the equipment in detail, and demonstrate how it is used, is available here:
