Folks,
I just can back from SMTAI in Minneapolis a few weeks ago. To me it was a big success. One of the reasons being that attendance was higher than I expected. It was also terrific to see so many friends that I haven’t seen in almost two years. Most of the paper and keynote sessions were standing room only.
I gave two papers, the first was Statistical Analysis of Transfer Efficiency in the Age of Very Large Sample Sizes. My co-authors were Indium Corporation’s Chris Nash and Ryan Mayberry. I think this topic is important, as data sets are often very large today. If data sets are large, say over 10,000 data points, even a small difference is statistically significant. This situation often results in statistical significance being meaningless.
As an example, assume you are measuring transfer efficiency (TE) of two solder pastes and each data set has 100,000 data points. The difference between 100% and 99.8% would be statistically significant if the standard deviations (sigmas) were 16.67%. A standard deviation of 16.67% is chosen as the common 3 sigma limit specification for TE is 50%. Clearly, in this case statistical significance has little meaning. We propose 5% or least 2% as a practical significant difference for comparing TE means. Further work is needed to verify these proposed practical significance numbers.
My second paper was co-authored with Tim Jensen and was The Future of Metal Thermal Interface Materials (TIMs). See a TIM image below in Figure 1. In this paper, we discussed the importance of thermal interface materials and their function. We covered solderable TIMs, gallium based liquid metal TIMs, compressible metal pads, phase change metal TIMs and hybrid liquid TIMs.
Figure 1. The above image shows the application of TIMs 1 and 2.
Both of these workshops can be seen at SMTAI’s virtual conference.
The keynote talk on Are you ready for the EV Revolution by Loren MacDonald was fascinating. Again, attendance was high as seen in the photo below I took. One point McDonald made struck me. He said that if 30% of all vehicles sold in the US in 2030 will be EVs, there will still be more gasoline powered cars on the road in 2030 than today. The reason being that cars are often kept for 10 years and auto use is increasing. So, EVs will not help reduce CO2 emissions until well after 2030.
Figure 2. Attendance was good at the keynote on EVs.
Cheers,
Dr. Ron