DATABASE ON LEAD-FREE SOLDERS.

NIST is working with the Colorado School of Mines and the National Electronics Manufacturing Initiative (NEMI) to expand a database on the properties of lead-free solders. With product cycle time being slashed to keep up with consumer demand and competitive pressure, new electronic products are going directly from computer-aided design to full-scale production. The worldwide movement in the electronics industry to replace lead-tin eutectic solders with lead-free solders creates a need for critical data on the industry's new lead-free solder compositions for these design and reliability models. The team is working with the NEMI Lead-Free Alloy Task Group to gather existing physical and mechanical property data that have been developed by researchers around the world into a single database. In addition, the team is working with NEMI to develop a list of missing high-priority data, with the list serving as a roadmap for research in lead-free solders. NIST and NEMI are planning to host a joint national workshop on these issues. The most recent version of the database is posted on the Materials Reliability Website at: [less than]http://www.boulder.nist.gov/div853/eudora="autourl"[greater than] http://www.boulder.nist.gov/div853/. The team plans to add additional data and to critically evaluate more of the existing data each month.