PCBA Services List
Elmet LLC provides metallographic and metallurgical services. We are A2LA accredited (Certificate Number 5120.01: Mechanical) to ISO/IEC 17025:2017 and have specialized metallographic capacity strongly oriented towards the cross sectioning and inspection of circuit boards, connectors, clips and electrical devices both before and after thermal testing or other types of environmental testing. We have more processing capacity for circuit board cross sectioning and solder joint inspection than any other laboratory.
We also perform various types of material inspections on circuit boards and electrical hardware. All electrical devices have metallic components that can suffer damage or fail due to causes such as fatigue, corrosion, stress overload, dendritic growth, and fretting. These are metallurgical issues, not electrical issues, and a metallurgical perspective brings insight into the problem.
Elmet LLC primarily serves the automotive industry, but has experience working with the medical device, wireless communication, wearables, battery manufacturing, power generation industries and more.
See our list of services below.
IPC-A-610 is the industry’s most widely used visual inspection standard for assembled circuit boards. Elmet has IPC certified inspection trainers (CIT) and certified inspection specialists (CIS) on staff who regularly perform visual inspections to IPC-A-610, as well as to other inspection criteria supplied by customers.
Whiskers are microscopic metallic filaments that grow from the surfaces of many metals; tin, zinc and silver being the most common hosts. Whiskers can grow long enough to reach adjacent components, leads, or lands, and as they are conductive they can cause electrical shorts. Elmet routinely performs both optical and SEM examination for whiskers. Energy dispersive spectroscopy (EDS, or EDAX) is used to verify the elemental content of whiskers. We often work to customer provided specifications, but we also work to industry specifications such as JESD22-A121A.
Under certain conditions corroded metal is redeposited as a metallic filament called a dendrite. A dendrite will cause a direct short if it bridges the gap between conductors, but even in the absence of a direct short circuit the current flow associated with electrolytic corrosion can cause problems.
We have a large chamber Hitachi scanning electron microscope capable of secondary electron imaging, back scattered electron imaging, and energy dispersive spectroscopic analysis (EDS or EDX). We use this tool in the evaluation of intermetallic layers, analysis of solder compositions, contamination studies, and failure analysis. We also sell SEM services on an hourly basis. You can hand off your SEM work to us, or you can sit with us and direct an entire investigation.