Experimental Analysis of a Novel Piezoelectric Jetting System for Micrograms Deposition in Electronic Assemblies

Over the past ten years, there has been an exponential growth in innovations and designs to offer cutting edge electronic devices that are smaller, faster, with advanced features built in. The existence of smartphones, wearable devices, tablets, etc., is the evidence of these advancements. Original equipment manufacturers are looking for processes in electronic assemblies that can offer high‐speed, high accuracy, and fine droplet mass deposition to address the challenges of product miniaturization, high-density component packaging, and complex designs. This work presents a novel piezoelectric-driven jetting system that is designed to dispense small droplet masses with high accuracy and speed. The system is referred to as “novel” because, in the contact style jetting arena, the piezoelectric drive assembly for use to drive the motion of the piston assembly at high frequencies (up to 500 Hz) is new; furthermore, the piston motion tracking feature is patent pending of. Using a split-plot design of experiments (DOE) model, the jetting system is studied to understand the influence of critical designs introduced and to further review the smallest droplet mass possible to reliably dispense. This experimental analysis uses some of the widely used adhesives in the electronics assembly applications.