MINNEAPOLIS – SMTA International today announced Bob Willis has won a vote of attendees for Best of Conference for its technical conference last year.

Willis won the Rich Freiberger Award for his presentation titled "Assembly Process and Product Failures-Causes and Cures."

With the award comes $1,000, half of which Willis donated to the Charles Hutchins Educational Grant.

Paul Vianco, Ph.D. from Sandia National Labs, won Best of Proceedings for the paper "Establishing a Ti-Cu-Pt-Au Thin Film on Low Temperature Co-Fired Ceramic (LTCC) Technology for High-Temperature Electronics." Coauthors include J. Rejent, M. Grazier, A. Kilgo, B. McKenzie and A. Allen, Sandia National Laboratories; E. Guerrero and W. Price, Honeywell.

Matt Kelly of IBM won the Best International Paper category for "Via-In-Pad Plated Over (VIPPO) Design Considerations for Enterprise Server and Storage Hardware." Coauthors include Mark Jeanson, Timothy Younger, Jim Bielick, Theron Lewis, and Mitch Ferrill, IBM.

The Best International Paper and Best of Proceedings are selected by the SMTA International Technical Committee.

A new award category, Best Student Presentation, was awarded to Cong Zhao, Auburn University, for his paper “Long Term Aging Effects on the Reliability of Lead Free Solder Joints in Ball Grid Array Packages with Various Pitch Sizes and Ball Alignments.” Coauthors include Chaobo Shen, Zhou Hai, Jiawei Zhang, M. J. Bozack, and J. L. Evans, Center for Advanced Vehicle and Extreme Environment Electronics (CAVE3), Auburn University.