Coarsening in BGA Solder Balls: Modeling and Experimental

The reliability of solder joints in electronic packaging is becoming more important as theball grid array (BGA) develops rapidly into the most popular packaging technology.Thermal fatigue of solder joints has been a reliability concern in the electronic packagingindustry since the introduction of surface mount technology (SMT). Microstructuralcoarsening (phase growth) is considered to be closely related to thermomechanical fa-tigue failure. Many researchers proposed coarsening models for bulk scale metals. Butthese models have never been verified for micron-scale actual BGA solder balls. In thepresent study, three different phase growth models are investigated experimentally onBGA solder balls in a real-life electronic package. Model simulations obtained from threemodels were compared against test data. The best performing model was chosen for finiteelement fatigue reliability studies based on continuum damage mechanics.@DOI: 10.1115/1.1602707#