Novel automatic repair of populated PCBs in a cost-effective and adaptive way

Repair of soldered components is a constant necessity in the electronics industry. Product performance enhancement, damaged components, and exchange of wrong placed components are some of the motivations behind a repair. Dispensing and placing a 400 µm pitch component manually is very time consuming and could cause collateral damage to the already populated components. A novel automatic repair method and tools with no human interaction were developed. This method uses the advantages of solder jetting and pick and place in one instrument, making it extremely accurate, reliable, and cost-effective. The use of different alloys including low-temperature soldering (LTS) is feasible. The results show that this technique significantly improves the throughput of the repaired devices.