In recent years, the popularity of Ball Grid Array (BGA) packaging had brought a revolution to electronic packaging industry. However, during product transportation or usage, missing balls were found in some of the packages due to solder joint failure, and this would make the electronic devices to be out of order since the electronic circuits are disconnected. Therefore, the research on solder joint reliability in BGA has become a hot research spot in the past a few years. Intel, AMD, NXP and other well known electronic package manufacture companies had paid a lot of attention to this issue in the past 10 years, but so far, no commonly accepted agreement on solder joint reliability was achieved due to the absence of a effective test device which allows the researchers to go deeply into...[ Read more ]

In recent years, the popularity of Ball Grid Array (BGA) packaging had brought a revolution to electronic packaging industry. However, during product transportation or usage, missing balls were found in some of the packages due to solder joint failure, and this would make the electronic devices to be out of order since the electronic circuits are disconnected. Therefore, the research on solder joint reliability in BGA has become a hot research spot in the past a few years. Intel, AMD, NXP and other well known electronic package manufacture companies had paid a lot of attention to this issue in the past 10 years, but so far, no commonly accepted agreement on solder joint reliability was achieved due to the absence of a effective test device which allows the researchers to go deeply into this study. Under this background, many approaches have been attempted. However, from the literature review, it can be found that most existing testing methods have limitations in their functions or design flaws.

In this study, a new high-speed solder ball impact test apparatus has been developed together with its operation system to study the solder joint reliability. The new Ball Impact Tester (BIT) system is designed to overcome their difficulties with some novel mechanical designs and a self-developed software system.

Precise high speed impact test can be performed by our BIT. In the test, the impact speed can be as high as 4 m/s, and the solder ball to be tested can be even smaller than 150 μm in diameter. The testing conditions are strictly examined, and the transducers have been calibrated carefully. The impact force profile is collected by the transducer, and eventually sent to computer for display and analysis. System automation of the BIT is achieved by the cooperation of the software program and BIT components. The BIT entity and the software work together as a complete system for shear test, acquisition, analysis and controls. As it has been proved that most solder joint failures are mainly caused by shearing forces during an impact on electronic devices with BGA packages, high speed solder ball shear tests can give strong support to the measurement of package reliability under impact.

The performance of the BIT system has been examined via a set of experiments. In the experiments, the repeatability and reliability are checked and analyzed, and it is proved that the system is capable and efficient for performing high speed solder ball impact test. It can become of great help for reliability investigation and standard making in electronic packaging industry.