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The need of silkscreen on the board during SMT assembly
805 1 Apr 15.2019, 10:40:09

Hello,
I just received a reply from an assembly shop that the assembly process is taking additional time because is difficult to place the SMT parts on the PCB if there is not silkscreen on the boards. I'm not sure this could be an excuse to get an additional couple of days or could be really an issue.
The question are 

· What is the advantage of having silkscreen in the board for a run of 10-20 units of with ~1500 parts, including from 0201 up to BGA 624 pins?

· What is your experience with assembly houses regarding this situation?

 


Personally, I was expecting that the assembly drawing and the pick & place files were enough to assembly the board.
I prefer to keep the board without silkscreen at all and create documentation for further configuration and or maintenance. But if the silkscreen is really an issue during assembly of few boards, I will need to change to another direction.
Thanks

 

Below some random example of similar PCB:

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A****min

Apr 16.2019, 09:45:50

You did not mention HOW are they assembling your boards?  
If it is such a small run ("10-20 units") then are they placing components manually?  As others have mentioned, if they are using automated pick-and-place machines, then the machine doesn't care whether there is any silkscreen on the board or not.  But if they are manually placing the components, and especially if they are small ("0201") then you can see why it would speed things to have something that the human operators can see.

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