Advantages and Disadvantages of Surface Mount Technology

Surface Mount Technology is something that has many advantages over the traditional through-hole technology that it has largely replaced. We have included a few of these below as the process is used within circuit boards and printed circuit boards that are used in video game technology.

• Few holes need to be drilled onto the circuit board
• Costs and budgets are reduced as the parts often cost less than their equivalent through-hole parts
• Components can be placed on either side of the circuit boards, which is beneficial
• The components of SMT are smaller

However, there are some disadvantages of Surface Mount Technology which are listed below:

• The manufacturing process for SMT however, requires positioning of parts of un-perforated boards instead of accurate drilling of many holes.
• Large, high-power or high-voltage parts are unsuitable for SMT. This requires the process of combining SMT and through hole construction.
• Manual prototype or component level repair is more difficult as it requires the use of skilled operators and expensive tools as the parts are much smaller.

The components on surface mount technology are often smaller than their counterparts and also designed to be handled by machines rather than humans.