What's Your Number?
There are a lot of things to consider when choosing how many samples you need for testing. Please consider these factors when deciding your sam...
Would You Trust These Parts?
After finding a batch of Package-on-Package components with a ~20% defect rate (that’s not a typo), I asked the vendor to have the lot of compon...
Ninjas and Flux
Ninja are known for their ability to combine two very different properties – power and stealth. Flux was never very good at this though, we usua...
Hand-Picked Designer Materials
It’s great when you find that perfect product, the product that makes life easy. Sometimes that perfect material has already been formulated &nd...
This Chart Can Be Yours!
The picture doesn’t do it justice, the real wall chart is around 23” x 33” and it contains a periodic table, list of popular alloys ...
We Are Engineers
This picture was taken before my last flight home from Taiwan. In front of me was a giant hunk of metal that over a hundred people would soon......
This Weekend Utica NY Hosted a Monster Truck Rally
How can I possibly put a semiconductor spin on this? Our industry seems just as simple when it is viewed from the outside. It is just a little piece.....
Low Alpha Solder
As discussed yesterday, alpha emission can disrupt sensitive electronic components. One source for alpha emission is the solder that is used to...
Alpha Particle Emission
Alpha particles are emitted from certain element isotopes, and can potentially change the binary output of a semiconductor from a 0 to a 1 or from a 1...
Welcome to Warp Zone – Halogen Free
If you remember from the days when Super Mario Bros. was the biggest Nintendo game on the scene, Mario could transport to a different world in the &ld...
Follow the Recipe
Soldering is quite a bit like cooking a gourmet dinner: there are raw materials, a process for putting them together, a heating temperature and time, ...
Record Makes Thin-Film Solar Cell Competitive with Silicon Efficiency
It was great to learn that the team at NREL have broken their own record and achieved 19.9% efficient CIGS solar cell. http://www.nrel.gov/news/press/...