
PowerPC, PowerPC 601, PowerPC 603, and PowerPC 604, are trademarks of International Business Machines Corporation and are used by
Motorola, Inc. under license from International Business Machines Corporation.
1000
10000
100000
15
20
25
30
35
40
45
50
T (
°
C) - Solder Joint Temperature Defined by Power On-Off
N
End-of-Life defined as 100ppm. Toff = 25
°
C.
For 1000ppm multiply by 1.3X.
21 x 21 mm, 16 x 16 array
21 x 25 mm, 16 x 19 array
Figure 7.
CBGA
Solder Fatigue Field Life Projections.
Each cycle is assumed to represent the full
temperature excursion.
Figure 7 shows the solder joint fatigue life for the 21mm
ceramic ball-grid-array (CBGA), the package for the
PowerPC 603 and PowerPC 604 microprocessors to be
over 9200 cycles and the 21x25mm CBGA, the package
for the MPC 105, to be over 7300 cycles for an average
full on/off cycle
T of 20
°
C. For a desktop computer
application turned on and off on the average of one time
per day, the equivalent fatigue life would be over 25 years
for the 21mm and over 20 years for the 21 x 25mm CBGA;
respectively. A 'worst' case desktop situation, as described
above would, with 2 on-off cycles per work day would
yield over 10 years of life for both packages.
SUMMARY
To predict solder joint reliability of surface-mount
technology, a key parameter is: the temperature rise above
ambient at the solder joint,
T. However, little data exists
in the open literature for printed-circuits boards or
components leads. Therefore, in-situ field temperature
measurements were taken for a range of computer
platforms at the central-processing units.
Printed-circuit boards (PCB) were not uniform;
therefore, only maximum temperature regions of the board
were measured. These maximum temperatures revealed the
mean to be less than 20
°
C above ambient (i.e.,
T < 20
°
C)
regardless of the power of the device. The largest
T
measured in any system was less than 30
°
C above ambient.
High power microprocessors generally had more efficient
heat sinking than lower power microprocessors resulting in
consistent temperature rises at the PCB. These temperature
measurements of actual computer systems are in close
agreement with IPC-SM-785.
By utilizing the measured PCB temperature rise, solder
joint fatigue life was calculated for the 21mm ceramic ball-
grid-array (CBGA), the package for the PowerPC 603 and
PowerPC 604 microprocessors and the 21mm x 25mm
CBGA, the package for the MPC105 package. It was
estimated that the solder fatigue life of a 21mm CBGA at
an average on-off
T of 20
°
C to be over 25 years and for
the 21 x 25mm CBGA to be over 20 years. Small
T's
associated with the interconnect joint equate to longer life
when compared to large
T's. Therefore, thermal
management design can influence the solder joint
temperature rise (
T's). Due to efficient designs, high
power devices were found to have relatively cool board
temperatures.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
The authors gratefully acknowledge the contributions to
this work of Bob Munroe. His proposals, suggestions and
support were extremely valuable and timely.
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