BEST has engineered and produced thousands of stencils in both stainless and plastic. We know the printing process and the stencils behind it.
As part of our ongoing development of SMT metal stencil printing BEST is now offering the most common metal stencil thicknesses in the ultra fine grain Tension™ material as its standard.
End users have reported that this Tension™ material has:
- Increased transfer rates on ultrafine pitch devices
- Increased print yields
- Reduced defects created by printing defects
- Increased transfer efficiency by 2-10% better than nanocoated products
ALL WITHOUT THE ADDITIONAL COST, TIME AND TEMPORARY AFFECT THAT IS PART OF A NANOCOATED METAL SMT STENCIL.
The above graph comes from a recent printing study(1) which compared the transfer efficiency-that is how much paste was being put onto the PCB pad versus the theoretical amount that should be on the PCB from the stencil for a group of different stencils. The BLUE bar graph represents the Tension(TM) material, the red bar the fine grain stainless performance and the green the fine grain with nanocoating performance.As this data indicates the Tension(TM) material gives us the widest process window by putting down the largest average print volume. In addition it had the most consistent printing results.
Similar positive results were seen on the smaller 0402 components.
More information and further results from numerous other studies can be found here.
1. Wettermann, Apex 2017.
Note: Tension(TM) is a trademark of Datum Corp.