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Folks, Soldering is an ancient technology. It is estimated that soldering was first discovered as long ago as 4000 BC. So soldering was much more ancient to Julius Caesar (100BC – 44 BC) than

Folks, Patty, Pete, Rob and the Professor were having their weekly book club meeting. As they were wrapping up, Patty said, “Remember about a month ago we talked about using an SMT Pretest

Patty was excited about today’s book club meeting with, “The Boys.” She had started calling her husband Rob, her former co-worker at ACME and now research technologist at Ivy U,

Folks, My good friends, Phil Zarrow and Jim Hall, in their award-winning audio series “Board Talk,” were recently asked about the “Five Ball Rule”. In the comments section for

Folks, Let’s see how Patty is doing, it’s been a very, very long time… Even though Patty and her husband Rob both worked at Ivy University, they seldom drove in together. It was

Phil Zarrow: Robert, the industry standard for process characterization is Cpk, and sometimes Cpu; Dr. Lasky has discussed this as it pertains to assembly processes. With regard to materials,

I just read an article published on an SMT-focused website by Paul Socha. Mr. Socha was the Manager of Applications Engineering for many years and was instrumental in creating the group that Indium

Phil Zarrow: Eric, the topic of surface insulation resistance, SIR. What exactly is it? What are we doing here? Eric Bastow: Well, simply put you are measuring the electrical reliability of a

The tremendous increase in the use of bottom terminated components (BTCs), some estimates are at more than 50 billion per year, have heightened the concern for minimizing voiding between the thermal

Robotic Soldering II After reading my last post on robotic soldering, you have decided that you have a good robotic soldering application and want to get started. You have also decided that you will

We have had a chance to look at low-temperature solder alloys and indium in particular. Now it is time to look at high-temperature solder and braze alloy options. Bernie Leavitt is our Senior Product

Phil Zarrow: Brook, we've discussed handling solder paste from the refrigerator to the stencil printer, but there's a lot more to this story, particularly from the factory to the customer.

Most articles I have read regarding Thermal Interface Materials (TIMs) focus on one application. Others generally focus on only one material (the material the author is promoting). In the case of a

In our first post about The Right Solder Alloy for the Right Application, we discussed low-temperature solderalloys in general, including bismuth- and indium-containing alloys. In this post we are

Promation Robotic Soldering Unit Folks, There is currently considerable interest in robotic soldering, with good reason. Robotic soldering can increase productivity and profitability, but it must be

Indium Corporation's extensive solder alloy list contains over 200 alloys and pure

Folks, The challenge of removing heat from electronics is almost as old as the 100 year old electronics industry. In modern electronics, most of the heat generated is by the integrated circuits (ICs)

Liquid metal (technically, metal which is liquid at room temperature) is mysterious to many people. It challenges the metal stereotypes we have -most metals are too hot to touch when they are liquid

For some reason, I find the combination of gold and indium incredibly interesting. This shouldn’t come as a surprise; I caught gold fever panning for gold during a trip to Alaska, and

If you missed the first part of this series, you can find it here. We have defined low-temperature alloys and discussed two interesting properties of these alloys: melting points and expansion during

If you missed the first part of this series, you can find it here. Expansion during cooling is a low-temperature alloy property that can be very useful. Remember your material science courses: most