An expedient experimental technique for the determination of thermal cycling fatigue life for BGA package solder balls

Although accelerated thermal cycling has been widely used in electronics industry to qualify electronic packages, efforts to reduce the time and cost associated with such qualification techniques are continuously being sought. This paper outlines a laser-moire based experimental technique to quickly assess the thermal cycling reliability of microelectronic packages. Unlike accelerated thermal cycling that takes several months to complete, the proposed technique takes one to two weeks to complete and does not suffer from various modeling assumptions used in finite-element simulations. The developed technique has been used to determine the thermomechanical reliability of organic and ceramic ball grid array packages, and it is shown that the number of cycles determined by the proposed technique is comparable to the number of cycles determined through accelerated thermal cycling.