Abstract
As the environmental regulation worldwide emerges, most notably in Europe and Japan, the elimination of Pb usage in electronic assemblies has been an important issue for microelectronics assembly due to the inherent toxicity of Pb. This has provided an impetus towards the development of Pb-free solders. A major factor affecting alloy selection is the melting point, since this will have a major impact on the other polymeric materials used in microelectronic assembly and encapsulation. Other important manufacturing issues are cost, availability, and wetting characteristics. Reliability related properties include mechanical strength, fatigue resistance, coefficient of thermal expansion and reactivity with substrate. In this article, Pb-free solder alloys have been proposed so far have been reviewed and are summarized.