Study on the Mechanical Bend Fatigue of Micro-Joining Soldered Joint with Lead-Free Solder

In recent years, several electronics manufacturers have been working toward introducing lead-free solder and halogen-free print circuit boards (PCBs) into their products. The key drivers for the change in materials have been the impending environmental legislations, particularly in Europe and Japan as well as the market appeal of ‘green’ products. The reliability of the new materials is an important determinant of the pace of adoption. Fairly extensive mechanical fatigue reliability data is also available for micro-joining soldered joint such as Ball Grid Array (BGA) with tin-lead solder. However, similar data is not available for BGAs assembled with lead-free solder. Mechanical reliability is a critical indicator for phone and BGA survival during repeated keypress, and to some extent during drop. In this paper, the mechanical bend fatigue of BGAs with tin-lead and lead-free solders on halogen-free substrates are examined respectively. A tin-silver-copper alloy was used as lead-free solder due to its increasing acceptance, and the results were compared to those from samples assembled with Sn63Pb37 solder. The reliability was examined at both low cycle and high cycle fatigue. Results show that the mechanical bend fatigue reliability of BGA assemblies with lead-free solder is higher than that of BGA assembly with tin-lead solder. Cross section and failure analysis indicated two distinct failure modes - solder joint and PCB failure. A 3-D parametric finite element model was developed to correlate the local PCB strains and solder joint plastic strains with the fatigue life of the assembly. The intermetallic compoumd (IMC) of micro-joining joint interface was analysised in the future in order to study on the effect of IMC on the reliability.