Issue link: https://iconnect007.uberflip.com/i/1116895
90 PCB007 MAGAZINE I MAY 2019 either. Fifteen years ago, Panasonic developed our original MEGTRON 6 product without re- gard to cost. We knew that if we didn't have a product capable of 5–7 lead-free reflow cycles while maintaining electrical properties that could be usable in virtually every fabrication shop on the planet, it wasn't going to be suc- cessful. The game isn't like that anymore. A lot of people are competing for this business because it's more profitable and there's a lot of visi- bility. I'm the chairman of the board of direc- tors of the High Density Packaging User Group (HDPUG), and we're on our sixth phase of the lead-free materials reliability project. Selecting the materials for the next phase is about a two- year process because we can only do about 10–12 materials at a time. We had almost 50 materials on the list that different stakehold- ers had brought to us. A high percentage were new materials, but others had just never been tested by us before. Johnson: The numbers seem to back up the ob- servation that new materials are filling differ- ent application types. Senese: Exactly. We have four different prod- uct roadmaps for materials currently in produc- tion. We have three stages when we develop materials. The alpha phase is finding out what the targeted values for a given product type and market are and coming up with our version of what we think we can do without any actual lab work at first. We take that out to some cus - tomers, asking, "If we develop this, would that interest you?" Then, we go back to the lab in the alpha phase and come up with some ideas to see if we can get to where we were told the product would need to be. If we get close in the alpha phase and come up with a product that seems to work, we might do a couple of very small short-term evaluations with a few cus - tomers to see if it's close. But once we put the stake in the ground and say, "This is the for- mulation and these are the raw materials we're going use," then the product specifications are frozen, and we go into the beta phase. In the beta phase, we pick key OEMs and fabricators to work together to evaluate the material and see if it's ready for primetime. Sometimes that takes a year. During that year, because most of these products are commer- cial, we're doing long-term aging with Un- derwriters Laboratories (UL) to get the prod- uct recognized. Sometimes it takes a couple of years because we get into that beta phase and find out there's something that needs to be changed. If the thing that we change doesn't affect UL, we continue; we don't reiterate the first part of the process. If it does require us to change something— generally, it has to do with the chemistry in the resin system—we loop back through UL again. That loopback can take anywhere from six months to one year depending on how close the the formula- tion is to an existing product. That process is true for almost everything we make. Most of the mobile companies now have at least some reference to UL recognition because of long-term aging. In the automotive business, several other standards have been developed over the years. And because of the growth in the technology in automotive and the kinds of devices that are being built, there are a lot of extra tests that are unique to the automotive industry. For example, the conductive anodic filament (CAF) testing that's common in the IT business is taken to a whole new level with some of the current automotive requests for essentially an electromigration test. Those au- tomotive requirements jump the voltage from 50–100 volts up to 1,000–2,000; that's created its own cottage industry, inventing how to do that testing. Panasonic industrial devices materials (Suzhou) .