Question posed by the Moderator to David Hillman:
What is the electronics industry direction for the “next generation” of lead-free solder alloy development?

Dr. Hillman responded: It’s kind of almost ironic, and what’s interesting to the materials science portion of our industry, is anytime you introduce a new material, it almost goes through some classic evolution phases. And, of course, with lead-free we’ve done that. First and foremost, if you’re changing your materials system as we are from tin-lead to lead-free, you need to understand the basic alloys—which families of lead-free are going to be best serviced for what we’re trying to do as we move away from tin-lead. And the industry has done that. They picked the SAC, the tin-silver-copper family. What’s interesting is that next phase is typically refinement of that basic system you picked, and that’s where we’re seeing the tin-copper modified alloys starting to take a bigger interest—putting small additions of, say, titanium, manganese, germanium, different elements of the periodic table to maybe tweak those base alloys to give them better microstructure, give them better mechanical properties. Give them; say for the cell phone industry, better drop resistance. So that’s the next wave of research and results we’re going to see coming at us.