Support Floor Life and Expiration Date Propagation#

Overview#

The Floor Life and Expiration Date Propagation feature ensures that critical material conditions, such as remaining floor life and expiration date, are consistently maintained across materials throughout the SMT assembly process.

By automatically propagating these properties during material transformation and consumption, the system prevents the use of degraded or expired components, safeguarding product quality.

Concept#

In SMT manufacturing, certain materials (e.g., Moisture Sensitive Devices (MSDs), solder paste) are highly sensitive to environmental exposure and have defined:

• Floor Life - available time under ambient conditions
• Expiration Date - maximum usable lifetime

Managing these properties is essential to avoid:

• Component degradation
• Assembly defects
• Reliability issues in final products

As materials are combined, assembled, or composed, their conditions directly impact the resulting product. This feature ensures that the most critical condition is always preserved, enforcing a conservative and quality-driven approach.

This means that any material created or modified during production will inherit the worst-case condition from its components, ensuring safe handling and compliance.

Functional Behavior#

Preconditions#

• Source materials must:

  • Have valid floor life and/or expiration date defined

• The product must have:

  • Propagation attributes configured

Configuration Model#

Propagation is controlled at the Product Revision level using 2 attributes:

• SMTPropagateFloorLife
• SMTPropagateExpirationDate

Behavior#

• When enabled:
  • The product will propagate the specified property
• When disabled:
  • The product will not influence target material properties

Supported Operations#

Propagation occurs automatically in the following operations:

• Combine Material
• Compose Material
• Automatic Assemble Material
• Assemble Material
• Replace Assembled Material
• Special Replace Assembled Material

The Expand Materials operation already supports this behavior natively.

Propagation Principle#

During supported operations the system compares:

• Source material(s) conditions
• Target material condition

And applies the most critical values:

• Floor Life

  • Lowest remaining time is propagated

• Expiration Date

  • Earliest date is propagated

If the target material already has a more critical value then no update is performed.

Key Capabilities#

• Automatic enforcement of material validity
• Protection against quality and reliability issues
• End-to-end traceability of critical material properties
• Consistent handling of sensitive materials across operations

You can find more detailed information in the Floor Life Propagation tutorial.