Electronics and Microprocessor Lab

ECE 326 and CCE 329

Lecture 3

Dr. Emad Badry

Lecturer at faculty of Engineering, Suez Canal University
[email protected]
 SMT Components

Surface mount device or SMD is the term used for the electronic components used within the surface mount assembly
process. There is a wide range of SMD component packages available on the market and come in many shapes and sizes.
For PCB assembly there is actually no need for the component leads to pass
through the board. Instead, it is quite adequate for components to be soldered
directly to the board. As a result, surface mount technology.

SMT advantages SMT disadvantages

❑ Not required drilling. ❑ Lower heat tolerance.
❑ More compact (High density). ❑ Manual assembly is complex due to the
❑ Faster and cheaper assembly. small sized components.
❑ More reliable at high speed. ❑ The physical contact to PCB is weak.
❑ Lower power handling capability.
Surface Mount Assembly Process
1-Material preparation and examination
Prepare the SMC and PCB and exam if there’s any flaws. The PCB is
designed using a software package. Once the PCB design has been finalized
and components selected the next phase is to send the PCB data away to a
PCB manufacturing company and components bought in the most suitable
way to facilitate automation.

2-Stencil preparation
Stencil is used to provide fixed position for solder paste printing. It’s
produced according to the designed positions of solder pads on PCB.

3-Solder paste printing

Solder paste, usually a mixture of flux and tin, is used to connect the SMC
and solder pads on PCB. It’s applied to PCB with the stencil using
a squeegee on an angle range from 45°-60°. Keeping control of this process is
critical as any printing defects, if undetected, will lead to defects further
down the line.
4-SMC placement
Once the printed PCB has been confirmed to have the correct amount of solder
paste applied it moves into the next part of the manufacturing process which is
component placement. Each component is picked from its packaging using
either a vacuum or gripper nozzle, checked by the vision system and placed in
the programed location at high speed.

5-Reflow soldering

Once all component placements have been checked the PCB assembly moves into
the reflow soldering machine where all the electrical solder connections are formed
between the components and PCB by heating the assembly to a sufficient
temperature. the correct reflow profile is key to ensure acceptable solder joints
without damaging the parts or assembly due to excessive heat.
6-Clean and inspection
Clean the boards after soldering, and check if there’s any flaws.
Rework or repair the defects and store the products. Due to
many solder joints being hidden it is important to have a non-
destructive method of inspection available that can be used to
verify the soldering processes are delivering the desired results.
SMD Resistors Dimensions and values
SMD Resistors’ values
 Microprocessor vs Microcontroller

Microprocessor Microcontroller
A silicon chip representing a central processing unit Microcontroller is a highly integrated chip that
(CPU), which is capable of performing arithmetic contains a CPU, RAM, special and general-purpose
as well as logical operations according to a register arrays, on chip ROM/FLASH memory for
predefined set of instructions. program storage, timer and interrupt control units
and dedicated I/O ports.
It is a dependent unit. It requires the combination of It is a self-contained unit, and it doesn’t require
other chips like timers, program and data memory external interrupt controller, timer, UART, etc. for
chips, interrupt controllers, etc. for functioning. its functioning.

Doesn’t contain a built in I/O port. The I/O port Most of the processors contain multiple built-in I/O
functionality needs to be implemented with the help ports which can be operated as a single 8 or 16- or
of external programmable peripheral interface 32-bit port or as individual port pins.
chips.
Targeted for high end market where performance is Targeted for embedded market where performance
important. is not so critical.
Limited power saving options compared to Includes lot of power saving features.
microcontrollers.
 Software development flow Embedded Systems

Create project: you need to create a project that will specify the location of source files, compile target, memory
configurations, compilation options, and so on. Many IDEs have a project creation wizard for this step. Add files to
project, you need to add the source code files required by the project. You might also need to specify the path of any
included header files in the project options. Obviously, you might also need to create new program source code files
and write the program. Note that you should be able to reuse several files from the device-driver library to reduce the
effort in writing new files. This includes startup code, header files, and some of the peripheral control functions.
Compile and link: In most cases, a project contains several files that are compiled separately. After the compilation
process, each source file will have a corresponding object file. To generate the final combined executable image, a
separate linking process is required. After the link stage, the IDE can also generate the program image in other file formats
for the purpose of programming the image to the device.
Flash programming: After a program image is created, we need to download the program to the flash memory of the
microcontroller. To do this, you need a debug adaptor if the microcontroller board you use does not have one built in. The
actual flash programming procedures can be quite complex, but these are usually fully handled by the IDE and you can carry
out the whole programming process with a single mouse click.
Execute program and debug: After the compiled program is downloaded to the microcontroller, you can then run the
program and see if it works. You can use the debug environment in the IDE to stop the processor and check the status of the
system to ensure it is working properly. If it doesn’t work correctly, you can use various debug features like single stepping to
examine the program operations in detail. All these operations will require a debug adaptor (or the one built in to the
development kit if available) to link up the IDE and the microcontroller being tested. If a software bug is found, then you can
edit your program code, recompile the project, download the code to the microcontroller, and test it again.
If you are using open-source toolchain, you might not have an IDE and might need to handle the compile and link process
using scripts or makefile. Depending on the microcontroller product you are using, there can be third-party tools that can
be used to download the compiled program image to the flash memory in the microcontroller.
During execution of the compiled program, you can check the program execution status and results by outputting
information via various I/O mechanisms such as a UART interface or an LCD module.
 Software flow in Embedded Systems

Polling

For very simple applications, the processor can wait until there is data ready for processing, process it, and then wait
again. This is very easy to setup and works fine for simple tasks. In most cases, a microcontroller will have to serve
multiple interfaces and therefore be required to support multiple processes. The polling program flow method can be
expanded to support multiple processes easily. The polling method works well for simple applications, but it has
several disadvantages.
For example, when the application gets more complex, the polling loop design might get very difficult to maintain.
Also, it is difficult to define priorities between different services using polling, you might end up with poor
responsiveness, where a peripheral requesting service might need to wait a long time while the processor is handling
less important tasks.
Interrupt driven

Another main disadvantage of the polling method is that it is not energy efficient. Lots of energy is wasted during the polling
when service is not required. To solve this problem, almost all microcontrollers have some sort of sleep mode support to
reduce power, in which the peripheral can wake up the processor when it requires a service. This is commonly known as an
interrupt-driven application.
In an interrupt-driven application, interrupts from different peripherals can be assigned with different interrupt priority levels.
For example, important/critical peripherals can be assigned with a higher priority level so that if the interrupt arrives when the
processor is servicing a lower priority interrupt, the execution of the lower priority interrupt service is suspended, allowing the
higher priority interrupt service to start immediately. This arrangement allows much better responsiveness. In some cases, the
processing of data from peripheral services can be partitioned into two parts: the first part needs to be done quickly, and the
second part can be carried out a little bit later. In such situations we can use a mixture of interrupt-driven and polling methods
to construct the program. When a peripheral requires service, it triggers an interrupt request as in an interrupt-driven
application. Once the first part of the interrupt service is carried out, it updates some software variables so that the second part
of the service can be executed in the polling-based application code.
Multi-tasking systems

When the applications get more complex, a polling and interrupt-driven program structure might not be able to handle the
processing requirements. For example, some tasks that can take a long time to execute might need to be processed
concurrently. This can be done by dividing the processor’s time into a number of time slots and allocating the time slots to
these tasks. While it is technically possible to create such an arrangement by manually partitioning the tasks and building
a simple scheduler to handle this.
In these applications, a Real-Time Operating System (RTOS) can be used to handle the task scheduling . RTOS allows
multiple processes to be executed concurrently, by dividing the processor’s time into time slots and allocating the time
slots to the processes that require services. A timer is needed to handle the timekeeping for the RTOS, and at the end of
each time slot, the timer generates a timer interrupt, which triggers the task scheduler and decides if context switching
should be carried out. If yes, the current executing process is suspended and the processor executes another process.