Indium Corporation celebrated with a press conference this morning the significant expansion of its onsite operations at 5836 Success Drive in Rome. With its growth, the Rome facility is now the company's largest manufacturing center globally in terms of square footage. The event was attended by media and special guests and the Rome business community.

The 24,000 square foot expansion is expected to have a significant economic impact on the city of Rome. It represents a more than $10 million investment into the local economy with the company looking to hire 300 employees over the next two years, with many roles needed immediately. In addition, the expansion brings the number of processes executed at the facility to 25 with more than 175 pieces of manufacturing equipment.

"The people of Rome have been welcoming to Indium Corporation since we began our operations here in 2013," said Indium Corporation President and COO Ross Berntson. "This investment represents our continuing commitment to being a conscientious corporate citizen, while ultimately contributing to the already fantastic quality of life here."

Since the commencement of operations at the Rome facility in August 2013, staffing has grown from just a few individuals to 163, with more hiring needed to meet increased demand. Overall jobs at Central New York facilities have grown from 681 in 2020 to 951 currently. Indium Corporation continues to grow globally with over 1,300 employees at 15 locations around the world.

Following the press conference, Indium Corporation hosted a recruiting event onsite to address its immediate production needs. The company is continuing its hiring campaign for Rome and other local facilities. Career seekers are invited to visit jobs.indium.com to learn more.

The Rome facility produces solder fabrications that are used primarily by advanced electronics manufacturers to build their final assemblies. Indium Corporation materials serve markets as diverse as aerospace, medical, telecommunications, and semiconductor assembly.

About Indium Corporation

Indium Corporation is a premier materials refiner, smelter, manufacturer, and supplier to the global electronics, semiconductor, thin-film, and thermal management markets. Products include solders and fluxes; brazes; thermal interface materials; sputtering targets; indium, gallium, germanium, and tin metals and inorganic compounds; and NanoFoil®. Founded in 1934, the company has global technical support and factories located in China, Germany, India, Malaysia, Singapore, South Korea, the United Kingdom, and the U.S.

For more information about Indium Corporation, visit www.indium.com or email Jingya Huang. You can also follow our experts, From One Engineer To Another® (#FOETA), at www.linkedin.com/company/indium-corporation/ or @IndiumCorp.

PCB West: The leading technical conference and exhibition for electronics engineers. Coming Oct. 4-7 to the Santa Clara (CA) Convention Center. pcbwest.com

Three Indium Corporation experts will share their industry knowledge and expertise during four presentations at SMTA International from Oct. 31-Nov. 3 in Minneapolis, Minn.

The following technical presentations will be featured:

• Novel Lead-Free Solder Alloys Based on Sn-Ag-Cu-Sb with Enhanced Thermal and Electrical Reliability by Dr. Jie Geng, research metallurgist

• Implementing the D-Value to Supplement the P-Value in Electronic Assembly by Dr. Ron Lasky, senior technologist

• A Novel Lead-Free Lower-Temperature Solder Paste for Wafer-Level Package Application by Dr. HongWen Zhang, R&D manager, alloy group

• A Drop-in High-Temperature Lead-Free Solder Paste that Outperforms High-Pb Pastes in Power Discrete Applications by Zhang

Dr. Geng is a research metallurgist in the Research & Development (R&D) Department at Indium Corporation. In his role, he focuses on the development of novel lead-free, high-reliability solder alloys for automotive applications. He also investigates the assembly process technologies in electronic packaging and interconnections. He received his Ph.D. in metallurgy from University of Surrey in the United Kingdom. He has extensive experience in materials selection, design, processing, and characterization. Dr. Geng is skilled in combinatorial and high-throughput material design using 3D printing and computer programming with Python. He has had more than 30 journal articles published. He is also a Certified SMT Process Engineer.

Dr. Lasky is a senior technologist at Indium Corporation, as well as a professor of engineering and the director of the Lean Six Sigma program at Dartmouth College in Hanover, N.H., U.S. He has more than 30 years of experience in electronics and optoelectronics packaging at IBM, Universal Instruments, and Cookson Electronics. Dr. Lasky has authored six books, and contributed to nine more, on science, electronics, and optoelectronics, and has authored numerous technical papers. Additionally, he has served as an adjunct professor at several colleges, teaching more than 20 different courses on topics ranging from electronics packaging, materials science, physics, mechanical engineering, and science and religion. Dr. Lasky holds numerous patent disclosures and is the developer of several SMT processing software products related to cost estimating, line balancing, and process optimization. He is the co-creator of Surface Mount Technology Association’s (SMTA) SMT Process Engineering Certification program and exams that set standards in the electronics assembly industry worldwide. Dr. Lasky was awarded the Surface Mount Technology Association’s (SMTA) Technical Distinction Award in 2021 for his “significant and continuing technical contributions to the SMTA.” He was also awarded SMTA’s prestigious Founder’s Award in 2003.

Dr. Zhang is manager of the alloy group in Indium Corporation’s R&D department. His focus is on the development of Pb-free solder materials and the associated technologies for high-temperature and high-reliability applications. He was instrumental in inventing the mixed-alloy solder technique to combine the merits of constituents to improve wetting, reduce processing temperatures, modify the bonding surface, and control the joint’s morphology, thus improving reliability. Dr. Zhang has a bachelor’s degree in metallurgical physical chemistry from Central South University of China, a master’s degree in materials and engineering from the Institute of Metal Research, Chinese Academy of Science, and a master’s degree in mechanical engineering and a Ph.D. in material science and engineering from the Michigan Technological University. He has a Six Sigma Green Belt from the Thayer School of Engineering at Dartmouth College, and is a certified IPC Specialist for IPC-A-600 and IPC-A-610 as well as a certified SMT Process Engineer. He has extensive experience in various aluminum (Al) alloys and fiber/particle reinforced Al-based composite materials, and Al-rich and ZrHf-based amorphous alloys. He has co-authored two book chapters on high-temperature lead-free bonding materials, has had a number of patents filed, and has been published in approximately 20 journals in the fields of metallurgy, materials science and engineering, physics, electronics materials, and mechanics.

About Indium Corporation

Indium Corporation is a premier materials refiner, smelter, manufacturer, and supplier to the global electronics, semiconductor, thin-film, and thermal management markets. Products include solders and fluxes; brazes; thermal interface materials; sputtering targets; indium, gallium, germanium, and tin metals and inorganic compounds; and NanoFoil®. Founded in 1934, the company has global technical support and factories located in China, Germany, India, Malaysia, Singapore, South Korea, the United Kingdom, and the USA.

For more information about Indium Corporation, visit www.indium.com or email jhuang@indium.com. You can also follow our experts, From One Engineer To Another

August 2022 – Bentec is pleased to announce that it has appointed Sincotron as the Insituware distributor throughout Scandinavia and the Baltics.

Founded in 1969, Sincotron’s operations have always been based on reliability, stability and, most importantly, the long-term relationships it has with its customers and suppliers. The company currently employs a team of 16 to cover Scandinavia and the Baltic states.

“Insituware has a very interesting new device, and we believe that this new technology can help our customers improve their process quality and lower their false rates. We have already conducted a couple of demos with good success and, thanks to David Bennett, we now have two demo units in-house, so we will have several additional demos with customers in upcoming months,” said Sampsa Rekonen, Vice President of Sincotron.

“Sincotron is the premier distributor for northern Europe, with a host of premier customers who undoubtably will appreciate the benefits that the Insituware material control products offer,” commented David Bennett, Managing Director Bentec Ltd.

Insituware LLC is the provider of the first smart in situ measurement solution with integrated machine learning technology. Its product offerings provide the ability to make real-time process measurements and quality control decisions directly from the shop floor during the manufacturing process. The cloud-based software system and small portable design allow customers to react instantly to process changes and make corrections and improvements quicky and easily, all at an affordable price point.

ABOUT BENTEC

Bentec is a sales and support company based in the UK that also provides a unique “associate” network of partner sales agents and distributors spanning Europe, the Americas and Asia. Several equipment manufacturing companies use Bentec to recruit and manage their international sales organizations due to its global network and vast experience in creating and managing them.

Since the invention of the first 3D printing technologies in the early 1980s, the 3D printing market has experienced a tremendous amount of innovation and interest. A niche technology until the expiration of key patents, the 2010s allowed many startups to emerge offering inexpensive consumer-level 3D printers. The subsequent media frenzy in the early 2010s thrust 3D printing into the limelight, accompanied by major multinational corporations like HP and GE entering the 3D printing space. After years of hype, the industry has moved on to a more critical examination of the value-add that additive manufacturing brings to businesses and supply chains. Despite the obstacles posed by the COVID-19 pandemic and persistent supply chain disruptions, the additive manufacturing market continues to find new applications and end-users. IDTechEx forecasts that 3D printing's continued innovation and meaningful adoption will lead the hardware and consumables market to surpass US$41 billion by 2033.

IDTechEx has studied the 3D printing industry for over a decade and has released their latest report, “3D Printing and Additive Manufacturing 2023-2033: Technology and Market Outlook”, providing the most comprehensive view of the market. In examining thirty individual 3D printing technologies and five major material categories, IDTechEx finds a continuous theme between these important aspects of the industry: expansion.

Evolution of Market Shares for 3D Printing Technologies and Materials 2022-2033. The IDTechEx report includes eighty 10-year forecast lines. Source: IDTechEx - "3D Printing and Additive Manufacturing 2023-2033: Technology and Market Outlook"

Given that established additive manufacturing technologies like selective laser sintering and thermoplastic filament extrusion are decades old, it might be expected for the market to consolidate and stabilize from a technology standpoint. However, new entrants with their own unique innovations on 3D printing are popping up every year, some of which are so unique that they don't fit into the classic seven printing processes framework. New technologies, which span polymer, metal, electronics, ceramics, construction, and composite 3D printing, offer different advantages and disadvantages to incumbents. Parallel to these new technologies are more incremental improvements in established processes. What both advancements allow is access to new applications and end-users that 3D printing previously struggled to reach.

Taking place in tandem with the expansion and improvement of the 3D printing hardware portfolio is the growth of the broader 3D printing ecosystem, including materials, post-processing, software, and services. For example, the 3D printing materials portfolio is expanding because of the aforementioned new technologies entering the market, which can process materials previously underused or underutilized by additive manufacturing. In addition, the software, scanners, and services sector of 3D printing is introducing new offerings to simplify the adoption of additive manufacturing by end-users, making their experience more seamless.

Across these different technologies, materials, and services, the theme remains the same: the expansion of additive manufacturing to enter new target markets and reach new end-users. IDTechEx expects this expansion to drive the 3D printing industry past US$41 billion in hardware and materials sales by 2033.

Market Forecasts for Additive Manufacturing Materials

The new report from IDTechEx, "3D Printing and Additive Manufacturing 2023-2033: Technology and Market Outlook", carefully segments the market by eighty different forecast lines across seventeen different technology categories, four major material categories, and eight material subcategories. These hardware and material forecasts analyze future installations, hardware unit sales, hardware revenue, materials mass demand, and material revenue. Additionally, IDTechEx provides comprehensive technology benchmarking studies, examination and case studies of critical application areas, detailed discussion of auxiliary AM industry fields, and in-depth market and economic analysis. Finally, IDTechEx carefully dissects the positive and negative effects of the COVID-19 pandemic and subsequent supply chain disruptions on the 3D printing market. For further information on this market, including 125 interview-based profiles of market leaders and start-ups, technology comparison studies, business model analysis, and granular 10-year market forecasts, see the market report "3D Printing and Additive Manufacturing 2023-2033: Technology and Market Outlook".

For more information on this report, please visit www.IDTechEx.com/3DP, or for the full portfolio of 3D Printing research available from IDTechEx please visit www.IDTechEx.com/Research/3D.

PCB West: The leading technical conference and exhibition for electronics engineers. Coming Oct. 4-7 to the Santa Clara (CA) Convention Center. pcbwest.com