The production processes of LED Strips are divided into manual welding and SMT automatic welding. One is a fully manual operation, the quality of the products depends entirely on the proficiency of the workers and the level of welding technology. The other is based on the automatically welding equipment. The quality of the products depends on the technical proficiency of the technician and the maintenance of the equipment.

Let’s have a comparative analysis of these two processes.

1. Manual Welding

FPC Pad Tinning—-Fix the LED and Resistor—Add Tin to the Pad in order to Fix the Electronic Element—Testing—Cleaning—Package

Advantages: Small investment, flexible. Suitable for small batch and multi-variety operations.

Disadvantages:

a. The soldered dots are not smooth and beautiful, and there will be some common phenomenon when working, like tin tip, tin slag, tin bag, and flux spatters.

b. It is easy to burn the LED package

c. The LEDs are easily broken down by static electricity. If the soldering iron and welding table are not equipped with anti-static grounding measures, the LEDs will be easily broken down by the static electricity during soldering.

d. LEDs are easily burned out by the high temperature. If the soldering iron is maintained for a long time during soldering, the LED chips will burn out due to the high temperature and overheating.

e. The manual welding easily causes empty welding and short circuit due to carelessness or unskilled operation of employees.

f. Low efficiency and high repair rate that will cause production costs to rise.

2. Automatic SMT Reflow Soldering

Open stencils—Print solder paste on FPC—SMT—Inspect before furnace—Pass reflow soldering—Appearance inspect after furnace—Function test—Life test—QA Sampling—Package

Advantages:

a. The soldered dots are bright and clean, with evenly distributed pads and component electrodes in a circular arc shape, and the appearance is neat and tidy.

b. The LED package will not be burnt due to wrong operation.

c. Full anti-static measures, so it will not cause the LED to be broken down by static electricity.

d. In addition to poor quality caused maintenance, it will not need a soldering iron. and less risk of burning the LED chips due to the high temperature.

e. It could control effectively poor soldering such as empty soldering, short-circuiting, and others by modifying the stencil, adjusting the printing machine precision, SMT precision, the temperature curve of reflow soldering, and so on.

f. High efficiency, low repair rate and low production cost.

Disadvantages: Large investment, long time to change lines, not flexible enough, need more consumables (such as stencils, solder paste, equipment accessories, etc.), and long production waiting period.

Apparently, Automatic welding is far much better than manual welding. What’s your opinions? If you have other questions or supplements, please contact us: info@ledsix.com.