Solder Joint Acceptability

Whether military standards are appropriate for use in commercial applications or not, they are the harbingers to industry specifications. When the IPC (Institute for Interconnecting and Packaging Electronic Circuits) rewrote its solder specification, the new spec was written with the intention of releasing it with military sanction. Because the IPC’s spec had to conform with stringent military specifications in order to be pre-sanctioned, it was of necessity essentially the same as the military’s, including such requirements as solder joint brightness, joint smoothness, and plated through-hole (PTH) solder fill.