The event, one of the world's largest for electronics manufacturing and components, will be held Nov. 9-12, in Munich.

Eazix Inc., the design service and original design manufacturing arm of IMI, will be represented by its distributor, MEV Elektronik Services Gmbh.

In a press statement, IMI president and chief executive Arthur R. Tan said, "Electronica offers a great opportunity to showcase our complete, cost competitive, and high value electronics manufacturing solutions and introduce ourselves as a reliable partner of European OEMs."

IMI, an ISO 9001, ISO 14001, and QS 9000 company, has over 1 million sq. ft. of manufacturing space and 12,000 employees. For a Circuits Assembly interview with Tan, click here: http://circuitsassembly.com/cms/images/stories/pdf/0410/0410finepitch.pdf.

Word from Taiwan is that flip-chip substrate capacity might be maxed during the first half, due to heavy demand for for graphics chips and chipsets. Rumors of price hikes of up to 10% abound.

Bough Lin, chairman of Siliconware Precision Industries Ltd., reportedly told DigiTimes that demand for flip-chip substrates will be over 10 million units per month, 70 to 80% of which could be consumed by ATI Technologies and Nvidia combined. The two firms combined demand was five to six million units per month this year, DigiTimes said. And VIA Technologies and Silicon Integrated Systems will need 300,000 to 400,000 units per month, Lin reportedly said.

Phoenix Precision Technology, Taiwan's largest flip-chip substrate supplier, will double its capacity to five million units per month by the end of February, Lin told DigiTimes.

Griffin, GA - The new CAMX standards for factory-level data exchange were the focus of a two-day workshop sponsored by IPC (ipc.org), the trade group that helped author the specs. While several leading firms are touting the promise of CAMX, the jury remains out on whether the drivers are in place for widespread adoption.

The seminar took place Oct. 20-21 at NACOM, a tier-one automotive supplier. Most attendees were already involved in the CAMX (Computer Aided Manufacturing using XML) API project headed by Georgia Tech's Manufacturing Research Center. These participants - Agilent, Asymtek, BTU, DEK, Orbotech, Panasonic, Pillarhouse and Universal - shared specific experiences with CAMX implementation. NACOM also detailed its switch to CAMX-compliant manufacturing during a facility tour.

Lacking, however, was the type of attendees the seminar was developed for - that is, OEMs and other companies that have yet to jump on the CAMX bandwagon. The open-architecture standards have been slow to catch fire, possibly due to integration costs, security fears, the general market dive that shrunk IT budgets, the lack of hard numbers on ROI and the availability of competitors that provide proprietary software.

According to Thomas Baggio, an engineering manager at Panasonic, and David Hicks, CEO of Nematron Corp., a high-end control systems provider, the real drive is lacking because an end-user push has yet to materialize. This group of early adopters is betting that the market and demand will tick up. At worst, the adopters already have platform-independent process control machinery in place to offer the kinds of integration, flexibility, traceability and data control advantages that manufacturers need more than ever.

BANNOCKBURN, IL, Nov. 3 - A group of leading vendors of solder today released white paper findings that "no significant difference" exists between a trio of heavily researched lead-free alloys. The lead-free pastes were found to result in less bridging but more voiding than a tin-lead eutectic control, the authors wrote.

In a 16-page report, the IPC Solder Products Value Council announced results of a down-select process of six tin-silver-copper solder pastes and subsequent PCB assembly comparing three of the alloys and a tin-lead solder paste.

The SVPC is made up of 17 solder vendors who aim to achieve worldwide consensus on a standard lead-free alloy. The paper details the second of a three-phase, $1 million program testing tin-silver-copper alloys.

Five solder manufacturers submitted paste samples for the anonymous testing, which was conducted by an independent party. The pastes studied: • 96.5/3.0/0.5 Tin/Silver/Copper. • 95.5/3.8/0.7 Tin/Silver/Copper. • 95.5/4.0/0.5 Tin/Silver/Copper.

Engent AAT,of Norcross, GA, tested one alloy per vendor using tin-lead eutectic paste as a control. Testing was performed on FR-4 boards using surface finishes of immersion silver, OSP, electroless nickel/immersion gold (ENIG) and bare copper and components with tin and tin-silver-copper finishes. Tests performed included: reproducibility of printed paste volume, solder paste wetting and spread, interconnect voiding.

Next, two major EMS companies, Flextronics and Solectron, built a total of 200 assemblies each, using the three SAC alloys and a tin-lead control. The companies then studied the three pastes for testability, rework and repair, handling and storage, printing, reflow and cleaning. There was "no significant difference" between the lead-free solders, they found. However, in general the tin-lead paste outperformed the lead-free alloys.

According to the report, "Submitted samples ... showed that, in general, the lead-free pastes were not as well-defined or as repeatable as tin-lead solder paste nor was their slump performance as good as tin-lead solder paste. This was most likely due to the use of a generic print process that was not optimized for each material.

The lead-free pastes also resulted in less bridging but more voiding than the control paste, the paper notes.

The final report is due in early 2005 and will include results and analysis of long-term and thermal-shock reliability testing.

"The SPVC is moving forward to complete this very detailed reliability testing program, in what we hope will be an alloy that industry can use with confidence," said Peter Palmer, SPVC chair and vice president of global marketing at Cookson Electronics.