-
- News
- Books
Featured Books
- smt007 Magazine
Latest Issues
Current IssueBox Build
One trend is to add box build and final assembly to your product offering. In this issue, we explore the opportunities and risks of adding system assembly to your service portfolio.
IPC APEX EXPO 2024 Pre-show
This month’s issue devotes its pages to a comprehensive preview of the IPC APEX EXPO 2024 event. Whether your role is technical or business, if you're new-to-the-industry or seasoned veteran, you'll find value throughout this program.
Boost Your Sales
Every part of your business can be evaluated as a process, including your sales funnel. Optimizing your selling process requires a coordinated effort between marketing and sales. In this issue, industry experts in marketing and sales offer their best advice on how to boost your sales efforts.
- Articles
- Columns
Search Console
- Links
- Events
||| MENU - smt007 Magazine
With Electronics, You Can Never Be Too Thin
December 31, 1969 |Estimated reading time: 3 minutes
By Craig Hunter, Vishay Intertechnology
Communications, entertainment, and lighting are being revolutionized by low-profile, surface mount components that retain performance characteristics with a reduced package size. Antennas, LEDs, IPDs, and other components prove that SMT can replace more of the through-hole products in the market.
Much of the communications revolution that we often take for granted in our daily lives would simply never have happened without surface mount component technology. Even if the only contribution of surface mount components had been to allow more efficient and less expensive board assembly, this would have been enough to make them a key enabler for the mass production of cell phones, PDAs, and other handheld devices.
Perhaps the most obvious contribution of surface mount technology, however, is in enabling key functions in less space, and in particular in thinner end products, than would be possible with through-hole components. This coupled with improvements in battery efficiency has dramatically altered the size of these end-products.
Take antennas, for example, which have become so invisible in cell phones and other wireless devices as to make users forget that they used to be just as prominent and quality-prone feature here as they were in transistor radios. Today, chip antennas using multi-layer ceramic capacitor (MLCC) technology are available with a thickness of just 1.2 mm and with dimensions like 35 × 5 mm and 10.5 × 15.5 mm. Miniscule as they are, these chip antennas offer complete UHF band coverage, working with a tuner chip to bring video to mobile phones and all types of portable multimedia devices.
Less obvious from the user's point of view, but perhaps even more dramatic for designers aiming at thin form factors, has been the emergence of low-profile surface-mount inductors, which eliminated one of the most stubborn barriers to razor-thin end products. New products in this category are being produced in 2020 case sizes with 2.0-mm profiles. These modern inductors' electrical parametric performance is the same as the bulky inductor "cans" they will replace, but on the level of board real estate and ability to shrink Z-axis dimensions, there's no comparison.
Surface mount technology (SMT) has likewise enabled integrated passive component arrays and modules combining a high level of integration with very small form factors to minimize the space used for power management circuitry. One of the latest advances in the passives category is a thin film resistor network in a leadless QFN package that combines four resistors in 5 × 5 × 0.65 mm package.
Semiconductor devices have historically been the most efficient integration technology. Digital circuitry has long benefited from the technical advances associated with semiconductors. Discrete devices have been following the downsizing curve by way of efficient heat dissipation packages and solder ball technology. Now, functional integration is becoming more important as they remove parasitics and improve power efficiency, vital to battery-backed devices. Today, all of the active circuitry for a 28-V synchronous buck regulator can be had in a 0.9-mm MLPQ-32 package, another 5-mm2 leadless package, eliminating all the extra space required for a separate IC and two MOSFETs.
LEDs are probably one of the highest growth markets in the component industry today. Longer life, higher brightness efficiency, and lower cost all contribute to this trend. At the same time, tremendous advances are being made in surface mount LED technology, allowing mobile phones to handily become flashlights and enabling innovative screen-based applications for which the electronics industry has only begun to imagine the potential. Replacing long-lead through-hole components, surface mount LEDs are now available with height profiles of less than 1 mm for these backlighting circuits. Here, as in mobile communications and computing technology, it is surface mount component technology that is lighting the way to a slimmer, more energy-efficient and brighter future for electronic products and their users.
Craig Hunter is an SMT Editorial Advisory Board member and director, global Internet marketing at Vishay Intertechnology Inc. Contact him at craig.hunter@vishay.com.
Related Articles:Research and Markets: Integrated Passive Devices (IPD) Report 2009: Technologies, Applications, Markets & PlayersThis study on thin film integrated passive & active devices shows how a commodity technology initially developed to replace bulky discrete passive components is now a growing industry trend driven by ESD/EMI protection, RF, High Brightness LEDs, Digital & Mixed Signal applications.
SMT Components Toughen Up for Rugged ApplicationsHunter examines the extent to which SMT components have penetrated some of the more rugged applications for electronics in general. Manufacturers are using novel approaches to upgrade device capability and provide higher performance and higher reliability for these more demanding environments.
Design, Manufacturing, and Reliability Challenges With QFNsCraig Hillman and Cheryl Tulkoff, DfR Solutions, provide QFN design and usage guidelines and possible problem mitigations or solutions to allow the reliable introduction of QFN components into products.