Indium Corporation Announces Silver Quill Award Winners

Indium Corporation has honored five of its employees for their industry contributions with its annual Silver Quill Award.

Indium Corporation’s Silver Quill Award program recognizes individuals who have authored original technical content in the form of conference papers, articles, presentations, and blog posts. It was designed to award employees for generating leading-edge research and thought-leadership technical content that addresses issues concerning customers in the electronics industry.

The following employees were honored with the 2020 Paper of the Year award:

Leo Hu, senior area technical manager – East China, and Sze Pei Lim, global product manager, semiconductor and advanced materials, tackled how the leap into the 5G era has increased demand for the performance improvement of mobile phones and the quantity of radio frequency (RF) front-end integrated circuits (IC) in their paper, Ultra-Low Residue Flux Application in RF Front-End Package. First presented at IMAPS 2020 Virtual Conference, the paper examines how ultra-low residue (ULR) flux, an innovative, truly no-clean, flip-chip bonding material, meets the need for enhanced performance. By using ULR flux, the typical water-wash cleaning process can be removed and, in some instances, package reliability is improved as well. This simplified assembly process will help to reduce total packaging costs.

Adam Murling, assistant engineering manager – technical support, Meagan Sloan, technical support engineer II, and Miloš Lazić, product development specialist, earned the award for their paper Fine Powder Investigation for Optimum Imperial 008004 Solder Paste Printing: Part I.

The paper examines the continued challenge of miniaturization for the electronics industry as assemblies continue to get more complex, component space thinner, and circuit board size smaller. As component size decreases, material suppliers have to develop next generation materials and processes to meet the industry’s needs and provide solutions for these evolving challenges. The paper was first presented at the 2020 SMTA International Virtual Conference, and investigates the effect of powder size on the transfer efficiency of solder paste.