For most of the history of industrial electronics, solder has been pretty boring. Mix some lead with a little tin, figure out how to wrap it around a thread of rosin, and that’s pretty much it.

Lead-free solder alloys have been around for as long as people have done soldering, with sources dating back about 5,000 years. Most of these alloys were combinations like copper-silver or silver ...

During the soldering process, chemical reactions occur between the base metal and the solder to form intermetallic compounds. These compounds often have different physical and chemical properties that ...