In today’s consumer-driven electronic marketplace many products have a limited useful life and component suppliers are moving to shorter product lifecycles. However, there are several industries that require semiconductor components to have a much longer lifecycle. In many cases application lifecycles within the Industrial, Automotive, Medical, Aerospace, and Defense sectors may extend up to 30 years or more.
As a result, an ongoing component supply becomes critical to sustaining these applications throughout their useful lifecycle. For this reason, it is often a requirement that semiconductor components be stored for extended periods of time after production ends. When long-term component storage is a requirement, it is important for customers to have confidence that properly stored components are reliable in the field. One key measure of quality and reliability is solderability.
This Rochester Electronics’ white paper looks at the effect of long-term storage on the solderability of semiconductor components.
