What is Industrial Temperature?
Specifically designed for harsh environments, SMART’s industrial-grade products with industrial wide-temp ICs and components ensure the highest reliability and stability in extreme operating environments.
Why Industrial Temperature?
Industrial embedded systems are usually exposed to severe temperature variations altered between extreme cold or heat, or used in countries at high/low altitudes. Commercial products are not robust enough to withstand these stringent environmental conditions.
How Does Industrial Temperature Work?
SMART carefully selects full-scale industrial-grade components certified for wide temperature operation, and produces memory modules with the highest quality. These products have passed industrial extended temperature tests and stringent thermal cycling test to ensure consistent operation and reliable performance under various environmental temperature extremes. SMART offers industrial temperature from -40°C to +85°C, and wide temperature from -40°C to +105°C as options in designated products.
What is an Anti-Sulfur Resistor?
Exposure to sulfur dioxide causes a corrosive reaction when silver alloys encounter sulfur gasses or liquid. This typically decreases resistor conductivity and thus increases failure risks. SMART uses ASRs (Anti-Sulfur Resistors) when needed for SMART-built products, allowing them to operate reliably in harsh sulfur-rich environments to meet the highest industrial standards.
Why Anti-Sulfur Resistor?
Resistors use silver because of its conductivity and stability. Sulfurous environments have a negative impact on the resistors because sulfur easily reacts with silver (Ag), and creates silver sulfide (Ag2S). The silver starts to corrode in contact with sulfur. This corrosion lowers conductivity and can potentially lead to module failure.
How Does an Anti-Sulfur Resistor Work?
To avoid a short circuit caused by silver sulfide, an extra protective layer is added around the electrode to effectively isolate the silver from direct air contact and potential sulfur contamination. In addition, SMART anti-sulfuration memory modules adopt Anti-Sulfur Resistors (ASRs) with a more resistant alloy, allowing them to operate reliably in harsh sulfur-rich environments to meet the highest industrial standards.
What is Conformal Coating?
As industrial devices have to survive exposure to harsh environments, conformal coating improves product ruggedness when applied on the module surface area. It enhances product reliability and safeguards against damage from dust, high humidity, salt water air, solvents, chemicals and other harsh materials.
Why Conformal Coating?
Conformal coating is a specialty polymeric film that protects printed circuit boards (PCBs) and electronic components from adverse environmental conditions, such as humidity, heat, fungus, dirt and dust, which will deteriorate performance. The use of conformal coatings is particularly important in automotive, military, aerospace, and industrial applications.
How Does Conformal Coating Work?
The film protects solder joints, electronic components, and other metallised areas on the board from corrosion. Once the coating type is selected, SMART's process of application is as follows.
1. Adopts automated spray systems to dispense conformal coating to the specific areas on the circuit board.
2. Dry the PCB by sending it to a curing cabinet to avoid deviation in the film's thickness and airborne particles adhering to the wet coating.
3. Inspect the still-fluorescing film with the long-wave UV lighting.
4. Measure the coating thickness to meet quality specifications which are critical in offering long-term product reliability after assembly.
5. Finish the product.
What is Underfill?
Underfill is a polymer or liquid epoxy that is applied underneath the perimeter of key components on a module to strengthen the solder joints and reinforce the product’s resistance against shock, vibratory stress, gravitational acceleration.
Why Underfill?
For harsh environments, such as in transportation, automotive, and industrial applications, BGAs are surface mount components that have difficulty meeting mechanical shock and substrate flexing tests. These packages are not designed to survive drop, bend and twist tests or shock and vibration tests.
How Does Underfill Work?
Underfill provides a strong mechanical bond between BGA components and the circuit board in order to increase resistance against vibration and reduce thermal stress damage.
1. Flux dispensing: Dispense a controlled amount of flux material into a gap between a chip and the substrate.
2. Chip placement: Align the chip onto the substrate.
3. Solder reflow: Run the assembly through a reflow solder oven.
4. Flux cleansing: Remove the leftover flux residues.
5. Underfill dispensing: Dispense the underfill onto the substrate.
6. Underfill cure: Thermally cure the underfill in the oven.
What are Retention Clips?
SMART’s patented retention clips highly improve reliability resistant to vibration, shock and sudden movements. As industrial and ruggedized customer equipment is exposed to severe vibration situations, module retention clips can be mechanically secured to the sides of memory socket to prevent the latches from popping open.
(Please note that retention clips and heat spreaders are only available for purchase in conjunction with SMART modules.)
Why Retention Clips?
For ruggedized and harsh operating conditions, SMART offers retention clips to secure the socket latches in place and industrial grade temperature operation from -40°C to +85°C.
How Do Retention Clips Work?
3 easy steps to assemble and disassemble the retention clips.
1. Push the clip to snap into place.
2. Clip fully snap onto the socket.
3. Open the clip and pull it out.
SMART Modular Technologies helps customers around the world enable high performance computing through the design, development, and advanced packaging of integrated memory solutions. Our portfolio ranges from today’s leading edge memory technologies to standard and legacy DRAM and Flash storage products. For more than three decades, we’ve provided standard, ruggedized, and custom memory and storage solutions that meet the needs of diverse applications in high-growth markets. Contact us today for more information.
