Current environmental legislation restricts the use of lead based solders in microelectrnic packages for domestic use, and a comprehensive range of "drop-in" alternatives have been developed successfully.  The aerospace industry is currently exempt from this legislation on safety grounds.  However, it is widely accepted in the industry that the aerospace sector may become subject to the same restrictions at some point, or lead containing solders may become hard to obtain.  At the current time, domestic lead free alternatives are not qualified for the aerospace sector and industrial studies suggest that performance and failure behaviour of lead free solders in the harsh aerospace environment is very different to the behaviour in domestic applications.

Recently, nanoidentation has been explored dfor its potential to charcterise solders on a length scale consistent with solder applications and this paperaims to explore the potential of nanoindentation to provide useful information on microstructural change in lead free solders and for direct inclusion in finite element simulations (FE) of stress evolution to gain a better understanding of the factors controlling solder life in harsh environments, particularly at elevated temperatures.

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