Issue link: https://iconnect007.uberflip.com/i/1243344
MAY 2020 I SMT007 MAGAZINE 49 able to satisfy that need yet, but that was a strong indicator we were going in the right direction. Matties: What are the key drivers behind this technology in terms of benefits? Ghosh: If you think about some of the thermally unstable substrates—such as polycarbonate, which is used for thermoforming—these go in cars. In the automotive industry, the require- ments for electronics are much more stringent than they would be for a normal consumer electronics product. When we're talking about automotive, this is mostly driven by compa- nies with new form factors and new places where electronics can be put. If you think about speed, a complementary technology to us is laser soldering. Nearly everything that can be done by photonic sol- dering can be done by laser soldering. There's no denying that. The speed, though, is three orders of magnitude slower—especially as electronics get smaller and as more and more components go on a panel. If you're going ter- minal by terminal, either you need dozens of lasers working at the same time—which drives the cost up—or you're proceeding slowly— which reduces your units per hour and drives the cost up. Photonic delivers a broad window of light, and anything that needs to get hot gets hot. Matties: Would this be better suited than laser for a high-volume production environment? Ghosh: Absolutely. Especially if you have a huge panel of micro LEDs on PAT that goes on a bill- board that is 48 feet by 96 feet, for instance. The number of LEDs is enormous. You're not going to be able to do that fast with lasers, no matter how many lasers you use. Our tools are designed to be modular, delivering wide panel- sized amounts of light at a time. That's an advantage we have over lasers. Second, if you want to move from one compo- nent to another, moving parts are involved—a level of complexity that's not ideal for produc- tion. The third part is, the soldering technol- ogy that we are talking about is pretty much an on/off technology. Whenever the light is on, things get hot. Whenever the light is off, things do not. The speed is obviously the advantage, but there's also the benefit of saving on huge amounts of energy. You're heating up only what you need to heat up, which might only be a few centimeters in an area. As the indus- try moves toward higher speed, a completely new form factor, and the push toward green, energy-efficient factories, the technology we have developed so far is a huge winner. Happy Holden: When I think of soldering, I think of lead-free solders or tin-lead solders or bismuth solder. When you say photonic sol- dering, like lasers, does this use the standard lead-free SAC305? Ghosh: Yes. Holden: Is the solder put down in conventional thicknesses by screening, or is this a special solder that's a nanoparticle that you guys developed? Dr. Rudy Ghosh