Data mining of printed-circuit board defects

This paper discusses an industrial case study in which data mining has been applied to solve a quality engineering problem in electronics assembly. During the assembly process, solder balls occur underneath some components of printed circuit boards. The goal is to identify the cause of solder defects in a circuit board using a data mining approach. Statistical process control and design of experiment approaches did not provide conclusive results. The paper discusses features considered in the study, data collected, and the data mining solution approach to identify causes of quality faults in an industrial application.