Investigation of electronic assembly design alternatives through production modeling of life cycle impacts, costs, and yield

Environmental legislation, technological advances and increasingly competitive global markets have led to a number of different product and process design choices for electronics assemblies. Decision tools to aid in the selection of a product and process design have been limited to qualitative methodologies. In addition, trade-offs between environmental impacts, yield, and reliability have not been analyzed. In this paper, electronic assembly product and process design alternatives are investigated using a quantitative methodology with life cycle considerations for environmental impacts. These impacts include energy usage, material consumption, waste generation, process yield, and product reliability.