Reliability of ACF Interconnections on FR-4 Substrates

The use of anisotropic conductive adhesives (ACA) in flip chip interconnection technology has become very popular because of their numerous advantages. The ACA process can be used in high-density applications and with various substrates as the bonding temperature is lower than that in the soldering process. In this paper, six test lots were assembled using two anisotropic conductive adhesive films (ACF) and four different FR-4 substrates. FR-4 was chosen as it is an interesting alternative for making low-cost high-density interconnections. Some of the chips were thinned to study the effect on reliability. To study the effect of bonding pressure, four different pressures were used in every test lot. The reliability of the assembled test samples was studied in a temperature cycling test carried out between temperatures of -40 degrees C and 125 degrees C for 10 000 cycles. A finite element model (FEM) was used to study the shear stresses in the interconnections during the test. Marked differences between the substrates were seen. The substrate thinning and also the chip thinning increased the reliability of the test samples. From the FEM, it was seen that both decreased the shear stress in the adhesive, which is assumed to be the reason for the increased reliability. A significant difference was seen in the reliability between the ACFs. This was probably caused by differences in the conductive particle materials and the T-g values and of the ACFs. In addition, the bump material used with the ACFs varied, which most likely affected the reliability of the test samples.