
FBGA User’s Guide
Version 4.2, November 1, 2002
69
the die, and the die is ‘face down’ and exposed on the back
side.
Figure 3. Cross-section of icroBGA
TEST BOARDS
Each FR-4 test board measured 3.5" x 2". Both 20mil and
62mil boards were used in this study. Six CSPs were
assembled on each board (Figure 4). On each board, half
the packages were oriented at 90 degrees to the other half,
and precautions were taken in the layout of the board to
ensure that the data collected is free of any effects of
location or orientation. The boards had Non Solder Mask
Defined pads with a HASL finish. Standard best practices
such as no-clean solder paste, laser cut stencils, and
Nitrogen convection reflow were used in the assembly of
the CSPs on the boards. Each CSP contains a daisy chained
die. The daisy chain circuit is completed on the board such
that each package consists of a single net through all the
joints.
Figure 4. A typical CSP test board
TEMPERATURE CYCLING
A 0°C to 100°C, 30 minute single chamber air-to-air
temperature cycling profile with 10 minute ramps and 5
minute dwells was used. This is one of the commonly used
test profiles in the industry. An event detector was used to
monitor the daisy chained test boards in real time. The
event detector was set to record resistance spikes greater
than 300 ohms for 200 nanoseconds. Any spike greater
than 300 ohms was considered as "open". A package was
considered failed when the first open was followed by 10
additional opens within 10% of the time of the first open.
The thermal cycling chamber was profiled before starting
the test, to ensure a uniform temperature across the
different boards in the chamber. Wherever possible, the
tests were continued to 63% fail or greater.
MODELING TECHNIQUE
After temperature cycling was completed, the failure data
was fitted to a Weibull statistical distribution. The Weibull
parameters
α
(N
63.2%
) and
β
(slope) were obtained for the
test, and the data extrapolated to a low cumulative failure
percentage (100 PPM). The test data was then extrapolated
to field use conditions and the projected field life (at 100
PPM) calculated, in order to enable a more intuitive
comparison of the reliability of the different packages. The
Norris-Landzberg modified Coffin-Manson equation [1]
was used to calculate the acceleration factor. The two
example field conditions used in this paper are shown in
Table 2.
Table 2. Example field conditions
RESULTS
Extensive temperature cycling data on the different CSPs
was collected. The test program included various
experimental splits with different combinations of package
and board types. For clarity, the presentation of the results
has been divided into the following five sections.
(A) Comparison of Different Package Types
The Weibull plots for the 8x9mm FBGA-BT, 8x9mm
FBGA-PI, MicroBGA, and 6x9mm FBGA-Cer are shown
in Figure 5. Here, the FBGA-Cer CSP contains the 8Mb
density Flash device, while the other three CSPs contain the
16Mb density Flash device. This data was collected on
20mil (0.5mm) boards under 0/100 degC cycling.
The Weibull slope and cycles to 63.2% failure (N63.2%)
are shown in Table 3. The Weibull plots show that the
FBGA-BT and MicroBGA packages have significantly
larger N63.2% values than the FBGA-PI and FBGA-Cer
packages. It is too be noted that the initial MicroBGA
failures are not solder joint failures and a discussion follows
in a later section. From Figure 5 and Table 3, it can be
seen that the slope of the distribution is different for various
sets of data and hence a direct comparison of N63.2% fails
is not feasible for the whole set of data. It is pertinent to
compare the results at low PPM cumulative percentage
failure mark. Hence, the 100 PPM number, which seems to
be a very conservative number accepted in the industry, was
chosen. Figure 6 shows comparative life projections in the
two example field conditions defined in Table 2.
In termsof board level reliability, it can be seen from Figure
6 that the FBGA-BT and MicroBGA ranked much higher
than the other packages. Both these packages demonstrated
Example Field Conditions
Temperature Swing
Cycles / Day
40 C / 60 C
-15 C / 25C
1
1
Encapsulant
Solder Ball (63/37 bSn)
Adhesive
PolyimideTape (50um)
Elastomer
Cu Interconnect
PI via: 0.33 nom.
Ball Dia: 0.35 nom.
DIE
Pitch: 0.75 mm.
1.00 mm MAX
0.23 mm