September 9, 2016 Patrick Curran : 0 Comments
by Leon M. Attarian, PennEngineering
Switching to surface mount spacers reduces hardware requirements and simplifies installation.
Application challenge: One of Penn Engineering’s manufacturing customers was constantly experiencing production delays for an application where printed circuit boards were mounted to daughter boards in a line card for optical fiber telecom equipment. Line cards are modular electronic circuits designed to fit on a separate printed circuit board and interface with a telecommunications access network. Board mounting was performed using four standard hexagonal pillars and eight sets of screws and washers to secure both boards. But high parts counts and related issues persistently slowed production, due to the tedious process of manually handling and installing the fasteners. There had to be a better way. (…)
