Jack,

While I can agree in general with your sentiment, this is one area that has been long recognized as being special.  As a PWB guy, you may find this annoying. Having spent many years in contract manufacturing, it is necessary to verify the compatability of materials, specifically soldermasks, in the overall process. I hope that the soldermask specification still contains the paragraph regarding the responsibility for determining suitability of a specific soldermask. There is no IPC guarentee that all soldermasks work with all fluxes, or all cleaning fluids. I can personnally vouch for a couple of combinations I wouldn't recommend.

I only wish everything were so simple. Then I wouldn't worry about lead-free solders and no-clean fluxes or active fluxes used on airbag sensors made in China. Or in Jet engine controllers on my next flight. Or maybe in the industrial computer mixing and blending gases.
Life with freon and RMA was sooo much safer....................

Steve Mikell
[log in to unmask]


Jack C. Olson said about  LPI soldermasks

> I disagree with this philosophy, or at least have a
> general problem understanding this philosophy.
>
> The IPC has been telling us for years that it would
> be better for our industry to develop generic
> specifications that all vendors should be able to
> meet as a bisic minimum, and that designers can
> refer to these basic guidelines instead of having
> to come up with vendor-specific solutions.
> That's the reason so many companies participate
> in their existence, so we can all benefit from the
> result.
>
> Why should every customer use precious time, money
> and resources to "develop a matrix", unless there is
> some "outside the normal realm of board manufacture"
> reason for doing so?
>
> feeling lazy today,
> Jack
>

--
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