Indium Blog

Enlist the Experts before Choosing a Solder Alloy for Chip Attach

I am well aware that many of you are now working in stressed out, short-handed workplaces and your workloads have increased significantly. With hundreds of solder alloys, forms, and flux chemistries to choose from, it is a difficult (and potentially time-consuming) decision to determine which will best suit a product design. I understand why product engineers miscalculate the effects of chip component choices, or let solder materials be assumed based on historical convention, but hasty decisions open the door to product failures in the field. My expert solder team and I are here to help you make the best solder design decision as efficiently as possible so that this doesn't happen to you.

When stretched thin, design mistakes happen to the best of us. For example, according to Andy Patrizio, Apple has encountered the misfortune of field failures with one of their most reputable products – the MacBook Pro. Solder serves a number of purposes (in this case as an electrical and mechanical connection) and on the most basic level, the solder must serve these as well as maintain joint integrity for a given amount of time. This can almost always be achieved with a little thought and engineering. According to Patrizio however, the 9600M discrete NVidia graphics chip in the MacBook Pro was designed with chip-attach materials that are failing. The operational temperature of the chip is melting the solder completely. 

In the least arrogant way possible, I'd like to make it clear that this chip attach issue would have been simple to prevent had the expertise of my engineering team been enlisted. Let us be your "call-a-friend" lifeline.