PCB PCBA Cleanliness

An important condition to avoid field return products is cleanliness, starting from the bare PCB up to the assembly process step by step, also to evaluate the best choice among various soldering processes and materials, to obtain the best result at minimum cost.
Total Ionic contamination machine is the proper equipment to evaluate if cleanliness is under control and meets IPC specifications limit (ROL0/L1 fluxes).
This condition depends on corrosive and conductive substances such as Chlorine and Bromine anions which are employed in PCBs manufacturing and PCB assembly processes (fluxes activation):

the Total Ionic Contamination evaluates the total amount of these undesired substances and then the Ion Chromatography distinguishes the single anions contribution. If these chemicals remain on PCBA could be responsible of failures related to shorts, weak conductive paths due to conductive dendrites and crystals growths.These tests can be performed also to verify the efficiency of a cleaning process or to check the final PCBA condition before applying a conformal coating coverage.

• Total Ionic Contamination (TIC)
• Ion Chromatography (IC): cleanliness condition from PCB up to PCBA