There has never been a detailed investigation and presentation of design rules and stencil aperture calculation-until now. Although many large companies have developed their own internal documents and the IPC is working on a document, Boswell's handbook is the first to be commercially available and could very well be the most detailed.

This handbook provides the design rules and stencil aperture information to the reader in an easy-to-read format. The spreadsheets provided with the handbook allow engineers to determine aperture sizes in order to obtain the required solder paste volume that achieves the ideal solder joint. The joints produced will then achieve the requirements of typical inspection standards such as IPC-610.

Only one criticism: pin-in-hole intrusive reflow and ball grid array (BGA)/chip scale package (CSP) stencil footprints have been omitted from the text. I feel sure, however, that they will not be left out of the second release. An update of the text is expected in the coming months.

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