This issue of Soldering & Surface Mount Technology (SSMT) presents a number of papers from the 7th High Density Microsystems Design, Packaging and Failure Analysis (HDP’05) conference held in 2005 in the dynamic city of Shanghai, China. With over 100 high quality technical papers and presentation this annual conference brings together scholars and industrialists from Asia, Europe and the Americas to discuss the challenges and latest advances in high density packaging. This e-book contains six papers from the HDP conference, plus one additional contribution, which discuss the behaviour of key interconnect materials for high density packaging such as lead-free solders, anisotropic conductive adhesives (ACAs) and isotropic conductive adhesives (ICAs).