Lord Corporation has announced the commercialisation of two new capillary flow, flip chip underfill encapsulants that are compatible with lead-free solder alloy processing conditions.

As the demand for flip chip integrated circuits continues to increase, coupled with the legislation to limit or eliminate the use of lead in electronics, the demand for high-performance underfill encapsulants that are compatible with lead-free alloy solder reflow conditions continues to increase.

Lord Corporation’s new lead-free compatible ME-532 flip chip underfill is specifically formulated to achieve high reliability for in-package or chip-on-board applications where fast flow under large chips is required. When anhydride based flip chip underfills are not desired, use Lord Corporation’s new anhydride-free flip chip underfill, ME-541. These material solutions are compatible with lead-free applications and pass JEDEC 3 requirements with peak solder re-flow temperatures up to 245-degrees-Celsius.

“Attaining lead-free reflow compatibility is not the only hurdle faced by underfills,” said Lynn Yanyo, Sales and Marketing Director for the Lord Electronic Boards and Components Industry Group.

“Flip chip packages targeted for high-performance applications are rapidly increasing in functionality, complexity, size and I/O density. To ensure their reliable performance, an underfill encapsulant is needed to eliminate the failures caused by stress generated during flip chip operating cycles. The underfills also must be easy to apply and therefore must offer rapid and fault-free flow into the decreasing gap sizes and through the densely populated interconnect arrays under today’s flip chip ICs.”  

The new underfill materials from Lord are engineered to quickly flow into gaps less than 25 microns with minimal filler settling and no voiding, encapsulating the fully populated interconnect arrays with a reliable layer of protective polymer. Thermal shock and cycling reliability testing has shown that flip chips under-filled with Lord’s newest materials are suitable for many flip chip applications including the harsh environments found in the automotive industry. 

Flip chips are used as central processors in computers and as application-specific, integrated circuits in a variety of consumer, automotive and industrial applications. Lord’s expanded flip chip underfill product line offers potential solutions to a variety of OEM and ESM underfill users. Lord works synergistically to develop custom-designed solutions within the customer’s processes and performance requirements.            

Contact information

For further information, please contact Jim Greig on +44 (0) 1506 652 992 or jim_greig@lord.com