In this video blog, Foresite president Terry Munson explores some of the ways manufacturing has changed in the past few decades – and how these changes contribute to new reliability issues and different failure causes.

Transcript:

The technology isn’t what we had in the 70s and 80s. We have much more sensitive circuits. We have very little redundancy built into our active circuitry. Now the OEM needs to understand that those types of things on the circuit board itself are critical.

The other thing we have been really surprised to find is not only the circuit board needs to be clean, but the environment and the housing/enclosure needs to also be clean. We’ve found we’re transferring contamination from plastic parts and machined, plated, metal parts, to the surface of circuit boards that are not protected with rosin based fluxes. Even with conformal coating, we’re getting dendrites growing through and on top of the conformal coating because of the outside contamination coming from a plastic housing or a piece of foam.

The biggest change is outsourcing. Everyone has outsourced everything to the tenth level. We have no control over our own processes. The OEMs who used to own and maintain and control those processes all now have outsourced it to someone who is supposed to be expert in that level of control – and they’ve outsourced it to the next level and then to the next level. The only thing that gets done at the OEM – the original equipment manufacturer – is the design and the quality program that gets documented and then the print gets passed down to everyone else. They take the final product and sell it, but they have no idea, in many cases, all the things that are going on and all the levels of subcontracting that’s really happening, both on the board fab side (all the components) and on the assembly.

We don’t put the crime scene tape out. We don’t get to carry guns. But we actually have tools that allow us to really help the client understand what happened – what’s the smoking gun causing their failures or their reliability problems. By doing that, we’re able to understand what the customer needs to do to educate and to change the process in the subcontractor’s mind – or decide whether they need to switch to a different subcontractor who is able to do those kinds of things.

Edited for clarity on 12/11/14