Buy The Safest Chemicals For Your PCBs

In PCB manufacturing, chemicals and consumables play a key role in the performance, durability and reliability of the end product.

- Baishakhi Dutta

India is steadily increasing its ex-port of various PCB chemicals like solder pastes, adhesives, solder fluxes and cleaning materials. This is a positive transformation, considering the nation’s history of importing chemicals since the 1990s. Local production of PCB chemicals is on the rise due to an increase in demand, as the electronics industry has made great progress. The competitiveness of India’s PCB manufacturing sector will depend to a certain extent on the quality, price and supply of the chemicals it uses.

The types of chemicals and their importance

Cleaning and de-greasing of electronic assemblies, PCBs and stencils are crucial for their longevity and consistent performance. PCB chemicals are used to clean thinning plastics, resins, glues, inks, paints and waxes. There is a wide variety of PCB chemicals available in the market, like wet cleaners, solder pastes, solvents, conformal coatings, anti-static protection products, stencils, the safe-wash range, and low VOC (volatile organic compounds) lubricants and resins, to name a few.

The cleaning process using PCB chemicals can be categorised into two types – wet process cleaning and dry cleaning.

Wet process cleaning technologies are the most used methods in microelectronics cleaning, accounting for about 89 per cent of cleaning processes. They are used for PCBs, memory disks, electronic packaging and finishing, and in the photovoltaics industry.