IEEE Power Electronics Magazine - June 2020 - 76

Company Profile

by Andy Mackie

Indium Corporation:
Igniting an Electronics Materials
Renaissance in Upstate New York

round the world, glowing touchscreens, displays, light-emitting diodes (LEDs) in our
homes, mobile devices, and outdoor
displays are examples of the ubiquity
of indium as an element, whose atoms
may well have passed through Indium
Corporation manufacturing or recycling facilities on their way into our
lives. Founded exclusively on the
properties and applications of the element In49, Indium Corporation has
expanded its capabilities over its 86
years of operation into a wide variety
of materials, applications, and markets. Indium metal itself now represents only a small part of the company's business. Over the decades, the
organization has become a major
materials supplier in areas as diverse
as automotive, medical, mobile, and
aerospace electronics; renewable
energy; wall-size displays; lighting;
and artificial intelligence.

Our History
The history of Indium Corporation is,
inextricably, tightly linked with the element indium. In 1924, before the company's founding, consulting chemical
engineer Dr. William S. Murray (Figure 1)
was looking for a nontarnishing "silver" for Oneida Ltd., a company that
manufactured silver-plated flatware.
Indium was one of the many elements with which he experimented.
Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/MPEL.2020.2985855
Date of current version: 16 June 2020

IEEE POWER ELECTRONICS MAGAZINE

FIG 1 Indium Corp. founder, Dr. William
S. Murray. (Source: Indium Corporation;
used with permission.)

After several technological advances
with the metal, he realized the many
possibilities, and, in 1934, he founded
the Indium Corporation.
Indium is a soft metal, but like
many metals, it forms very hard intermetallics, and, perhaps ironically, one
of the first applications of indium was
in reducing wear in rotary aircraft
engine parts. The company's process
was patented in 1938 and, in 1942,
Indium Corporation was awarded
the prestigious U.S. Army/Navy "E"
Award for engineering excellence for
this technology.
For centuries, the off-eutectic
50:50 tin-lead (liquidus 255 °C/solidus 183 °C) solder was the de facto
alloy used for both mechanical and
electrical soldering. In the 1950s,

z June 2020

when Texas Instruments was looking for a solder that melted lower
than 50:50 tin-lead Dr. Murray recommended the lead-free 50:50 indium-tin (InSn) alloy (liquidus 125 °C/
solidus 118 °C), which became the
company's Indalloy #1. Research led
to further alloy developments, and
the options grew every year. Today,
the company's solder and brazing
alloy directory has more than 280
Indalloy entries. The company now
provides these alloys in a variety of
forms, including powder, solder paste,
and microspheres; and in a variety of
shapes, sizes, and thicknesses, as well
as specialty surface treatments of solder preforms for power electronics
and similar applications.
In 1933, Indium Corporation was
awarded a patent for an indium-gold
dental alloy. The company manufactured its first solder preform in the
1940s. This addressed the assembly
world's need for precise amounts of
solder in specific locations. This development helped set the stage for the
eventual electronics miniaturization
demand that swept the world. This
was followed by developments in tape
and reel solder preform packaging
that enabled robotic assembly processes that arose once the demand for
high volume, miniaturized electronics
assembly gained strength.
In 1982, Indium Corporation added
powder manufacturing capabilities
as part of its growing solder paste
program for the emergent surface

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