9452497 Blackwell This proposal covers the development and implementation of an undergraduate laboratory to support the teaching of a course in Surface Mount Technology (SMT). SMT is the prevailing technology used by major electronic circuit board manufacturers, whether their board production is captive, that is for use in their own products, or they are a contract circuit board manufacturer for others who will assemble the board into a product. SMT must use a concurrent engineering approach to the design, manufacturing, and testing of a device. This lab will demonstrate these principles by not only allowing the students to manufacture circuit boards using both SMT and through-hole principles and devices, but also by allowing the students to observe, through the requested instrumentation, the results of errors in the process. The course and lab is also intended to educate the target audience of electrical engineering technology students as to actual uses for the courses in heat transfer, strain, and chemistry they have taken but wondered what to do with. Principles from these areas will be applied during this course to both predict and demonstrate issues such as heat transfer, cracking of solder joints and the results of using an incorrect solder paste mixture. This project is intended to be used as a demonstration to the engineering education community the value of teaching SMT at the undergraduate level. To that end the results will be disseminated to that community, as will updates as progress continues past the term of the grant.
