Folks,
My friends at Indium put on another of their terrific Quickstart Workshops in Libertyville, IL this past Tuesday and Wednesday. In addition to covering all of the important lead free (Really WEEE/RoHS) topics, a special announcement was made at the seminar by the Keynote Speaker, Vahid Goudarzi. Vahid shared that the widely known "disadvantage" of lead free soldering, its weaker wetability, has been turned into and advantage by Motorola. Motorola has used lead-free solder's poorer wetability and developed a process protocol that allows 30% or so reduction in real estate used. This real estate savings has enabled them to pack more components in less space. Motorola applied for a patent for the process in January of 2004. Contact Vahid for further information.
Motorola has manufactured the better part of 100 million cellular phones with Indium's NC-SMQ 230 lead-free solder paste.
Dr. Ron