SMT Soldering

- overview or tutorial about SMT soldering, the SMD solder process for surface mount components.

With the rise in the level of SMT or surface mount technology used in electronics to the extent that traditional leaded components are rarely used for mass produced electronics equipment, there has been a similar move forward on soldering techniques for SMT.

Although in the very first days of using surface mount technology, SMT, soldering was sometimes achieved manually, this is not feasible in the vast majority of cases today for two reasons:

• The minute size of the components and tracks is too small for manual operations and traditional soldering.



• The quantities of circuits normally produced could not be achieved using manual methods.

SMT soldering process

There are several stages required to solder SMDs to boards. However there are two basic methods of soldering that are used. These two processes require the board to be laid out with slightly different PCB design rules, and they also require the SMT soldering process to be different. The two main methods for SMT soldering are:

• Wave soldering



• Reflow soldering