A study on the thermal fatigue behavior of solder joints under power cycling conditions

Failure mechanisms exposed by environmental accelerating testing methods such as thermal cycling or thermal shock test, may differ from those at service operating conditions. While the device is heated up or cooled down evenly on its external surface during environmental testing, real operating powered devices experience temperature gradients caused by internal local heating, components' different heat dissipation capability, and ambient temperature variation, etc. In this study, a power cycling technique is introduced to better approximate the field operating conditions so as to activate the field failure modes. Power cycling thermal fatigue test is performed with different ball grid array solder joints, that is, lead contained [Sn/37 Ph (SP)] and lead free [Sn/4.0Ag/0.5 Cu (SAC)], and the result is compared. In order to account for the thermal fatigue life behavior discrepancy for different solder joint composition, real time moire interferometry is applied to measure the global/local thermo-mechanical behavior during power cycling excursion. Effective damage parameter, the total average shear strain, is extracted from the experiment and applied to account for the difference in fatigue life result of two different solders. In addition, amount of experimentally measured total average shear strain is mutually verified with finite element method analysis. It is clear that total average shear strain of a solder joint can be an effective damage parameter to predict thermo-mechanical fatigue life. A physical mechanism in terms of thermal material property of solder joints' is proposed to offer some thoughts to abnormal shear strain behavior that leads to discrepancies in fatigue life of two solders. An importance of power cycling testing method is emphasized for certain package designs.