Pat Trippel, President of Electronics Group, Henkel

Without question, this past year has been full of milestones for Henkel – events and product developments that will undoubtedly enable our customers’ competitiveness.

The acquisition of Accurus Scientific Company, Ltd., completed in Q4 of 2006, was very successful and the advanced solder sphere portfolio has now been fully incorporated into our product line. Customer acceptance and approval of the Multicore® Accurus™ products has been extremely quick, necessitating the expansion of manufacturing capabilities which were added in our Yantai, China facility.

We also have commercialized several second-generation lead-free materials that are both RoHS compliant and RoHS capable (and, yes, there is a difference – call us if you need clarification!). New Amine-based underfills, self-aligning Cornerbond™ materials, advanced die attach pastes and films, among others, have all been brought to market by Henkel this year.

More capability is migrating away from the PCB and into the package, as in the case of System-in-Package (SiP) devices. Stacked packages, such as package on package (POP) configurations are also gaining steam and Henkel’s developments in POP-enabling materials such as die attach pastes and dicing die attach films (DDF), underfills, tacky fluxes solder spheres and mold compounds are providing the robust performance needed to move POPs into the mainstream.

The adoption of lead-free manufacturing has necessitated the need to underfill CSP and BGA devices and, though capillary underfills are still required for some applications, newer generation Cornerbond and Edgebond processes are becoming increasingly popular as cost-effective and reliable alternatives for many electronics products.

Suffice it to say it has been a busy and successful year and we are optimistic that 2008 will be much the same for our company. There are countless new products in the pipeline and we continue to expand globally to support Henkel customers worldwide.