Indium Corporation Senior Technologist’s Knowledge Showcased at SMTA PanPac

Estimated reading time: 3 minutes

Indium Corporation’s Ron Lasky, Ph.D., PE, senior technologist, will share his industry knowledge and expertise during two presentations at the SMTA Pan Pacific Microelectronics Symposium (SMTA PanPac), Jan. 31-Feb. 3, Honolulu, O’ahu, Hawaii, U.S.

Today, the upper range of soldering temperatures is at its highest in history. For some applications, it is more advantageous to use solders that melt at closer to tin-lead temperatures, resulting in increased interest in low-melting point solders, such as tin-bismuth solders. However, the lower melting point of SnBi solders along with their brittle nature limit their application in many harsh environments, such as automobile and military applications. The electronics industry could use a solder that can reflow at a little over 200°C, but still have a high use temperature. In Low Melt High Remelt Solder Paste, co-authored with Indium Corporation’s Product Development Specialist Claire Hotvedt, Dr. Lasky will detail how this “unsolvable conundrum” resulted in the breakthrough development of a new solder paste that features a use temperature in the 89.4 to 134.7°C range with a post-reflow remelt temperature above 180°C.

Bottom terminated components (BTCs) are one of the most important components in electronics today. Their combination of small size, excellent electrical performance, and ability to transfer heat away from the integrated circuit has resulted in BTCs becoming one of the most common packages with the highest growth rate. One popular BTC is the quad flat pack no leads (QFN). Since one of the main strengths of QFNs is dissipating heat, any voiding in the solder connecting the thermal pad on the QFN to the printed wiring board will degrade the intended performance of the QFN, resulting in reliability and operational issues. While degraded thermal performance may not be a critical issue for some consumer products, the rapid growth of automobile electronics and the emergence of 5G telecom equipment makes robust thermal performance of QFNs vital. Co-authored with Indium Corporation’s Senior Product Manager Chris Nash, Technical Support Engineer Emily Belfield, and Hotvedt, Dr. Lasky will examine how experimental plans to minimize voiding in QFN assembly resulted in a reduction in voiding to the 20% range or less in Minimizing Voiding in BTCs: 2022. While voiding can be essentially eliminated with vacuum reflow, there are some process challenges, including thicker intermetallics that form due to increased reflow times.

Dr. Lasky also co-authored two additional papers that will be presented at the conference: Quantum Computing 101 and Derivation of the Shewhart Rules.

In addition to his role at Indium Corporation, Dr. Lasky is also a professor of engineering and the director of the Lean Six Sigma program at Dartmouth College in Hanover, N.H., U.S. He has more than 30 years of experience in electronics and optoelectronics packaging at IBM, Universal Instruments, and Cookson Electronics. Dr. Lasky has authored six books, and contributed to several more, on science, electronics, and optoelectronics, and has authored numerous technical papers. Additionally, he has served as an adjunct professor at several colleges, teaching more than 20 different courses on topics ranging from electronics packaging, materials science, statistics, physics, mechanical engineering, and science and religion. Dr. Lasky holds numerous patent disclosures and is the developer of several SMT processing software products related to cost estimating, line balancing, and process optimization. He is the co-creator of Surface Mount Technology Association’s (SMTA) SMT Process Engineering Certification program and exams that set standards in the electronics assembly industry worldwide. Dr. Lasky was awarded SMTA’s Technical Distinction Award in 2021 for his “significant and continuing technical contributions to the SMTA.” He was also awarded SMTA’s prestigious Founder’s Award in 2003.

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