Enhancing circular economy by facilitating the repair of electronic components

A circular economy and sustainable electronics are a must in the modern industry, not only for environmental reasons but also for commercial ones. Facilitating electronic repair helps to prolong the life span of products, enhance their performance and to correct production mistakes. Dispensing and placing a fine pitch component manually is very time consuming and could cause collateral damage to the already populated devices. A novel automatic repair method and tools with no human interaction were developed. This method uses the advantages of medium jetting, pick-and-place and quality control in one instrument, making it extremely accurate, reliable, and cost-effective. This method can be applied to replace components on PCBs and for BGAs reballing. The use of different alloys including low-temperature soldering (LTS) is feasible. The results show that this technique significantly improves the throughput and yield of the repaired devices.