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Impact of temperature cycle profile on fatigue

life of solder joints
ARTICLE in IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON ADVANCED PACKAGING SEPTEMBER 2002
Impact Factor: 1.28 DOI: 10.1109/TADVP.2002.806735 Source: IEEE Xplore

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Alexander N. Cartwright

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IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON ADVANCED PACKAGING, VOL. 25, NO. 3, AUGUST 2002

433

Impact of Temperature Cycle Profile on Fatigue Life

of Solder Joints
Terry Dishongh, Cemal Basaran, Alexander N. Cartwright, Member, IEEE, Ying Zhao, and
Heng Liu, Student Member, IEEE

AbstractIn this paper the influence of the temperature cycle

time history profile on the fatigue life of ball grid array (BGA)
solder joints is studied. Temperature time history in a Pentium processor laptop computer was measured for a three-month period
by means of thermocouples placed inside the computer. In addition, pentium BGA packages were subjected to industry standard
temperature cycles and also to in-situ measured temperature cycle
profiles. Inelastic strain accumulation in each solder joint during
thermal cycling was measured by high sensitivity Moir interferometry technique. Results indicate that fatigue life of the solder
joint is not independent of the temperature cycle profile used. Industry standard temperature cycle profile leads to conservative fatigue life observations by underestimating the actual number of
cycles to failure.
Index TermsBGA packaging, Moir interferometry, solder
joints fatigue, temperature cycle profile.

I. INTRODUCTION

HE RELIABILITY of microelectronic packaging solder

joints is critical to quality and integrity of electronic devices. Ball grid array (BGA) packaging is becoming one of the
most popular electronic packages in the microelectronics industry, due to its many advantages over all other packaging technologies.
The Pb/Sn eutectic solder alloy is widely used as a joining
material. It is well known that the dominant failure mode for
solder joints is low cycle thermal fatigue, which is caused by
thermal expansion mismatch between the bonded components
and heat dissipated by devices during operation.
Although the thermomechanical response of solder joints
under thermal cycling has been studied extensively, Basaran
et al. [1], [2] presents an extensive literature survey on the
subject, the impact and effect of temperature fluctuations
during dwell times on BGA solder joint fatigue life has never
been studied or reported in the literature. The main question
in reliability studies has always been; is temperature cycling
appropriate both in the time history profile and magnitude if
we are unsure of the damage mechanism and strain field in the
Manuscript received November 6, 2000; revised August 1, 2002. This work
was supported in part by Intel Corporation and the National Science Foundation
CMS-Material Processing and Surface Engineering Program Grant 9908016.
T. Dishongh is with Intel Corporation, Hillsboro, OR 97124-6497 USA.
C. Basaran, A. N. Cartwright, and H. Liu are with the Electronic Packaging
Laboratory, State University of New York at Buffalo, Buffalo, NY 14260-1920
USA (e-mail: cjb@eng.buffalo.edu).
Y. Zhao was with the Electronic Packaging Laboratory, State University of
New York at Buffalo, Buffalo, NY 14260-1920 USA. She is now with Analog
Devices, Norwood, MA 02062-9106 USA.
Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/TADVP.2002.806735

solder joint? What is the baseline of inelastic strains developed

in thermal cycling and usage? Until now these questions remain
unanswered because of a lack of a technique to measure the
strain field in solder joint in fatigue testing.
Temperature cycling is used as a standard industry practice
for determining the thermomechanical fatigue life and reliability of solder joints [3][5]. Testing under thermal cycling
conditions is a vehicle to accelerate the fatigue failure mechanism. The test yields the number of cycles to the failure value.
Yet thermal cycling alone does not give any local information
about the failure mechanism in the solder joint. On the other
hand high sensitivity Moir interferometry provides whole field
maps of in-plane deformation contours with sub micron resolution, and provides both normal and shear strains. Such capability
is extremely useful for studying thermomechanical behavior of
solder joints in electronic packaging. A Moir interferometry
technology developed in the UB Electronic Packaging Laboratory allows recording of inelastic strain accumulations for cyclic
thermomechanical loading. As inelastic deformation is directly
related to fatigue life of solder joints, the inelastic strain accumulation can be used to evaluate solder joint fatigue life performance.
II. EXPERIMENTAL PROCEDURE
The industry standard temperature profile have a jigsaw shape
with dwell times at maximum and minimum temperatures as
shown in Fig. 1(a). The conventional temperature time histories are based on many assumptions that have no technical or
empirical basis. During this study several Pentium Processor
based laptop computers were wired with thermocouples in two
different locations for a three-month period. One thermocouple
was on the thermal plate of the processor and the other was on
the motherboard away from the VR on the PCB. Temperature
time histories were recorded. The observation indicates that the
actual temperature profile experienced by the package is different than traditional temperature time histories used for temperature cycling tests in the industry. Fig. 1(b) and (c) were obtained from the in-situ field measurements.
The purpose of this study is to compare the influence of the
temperature time history profile on the fatigue life of BGA
solder joints. In this study an industry standard temperature
profile as well as the in-situ measured actual temperature time
histories are used for thermal cycling.
Three different temperature profiles were used. Test 1 has a
conventional thermal cycling profile, Fig. 1(a). For Test 2 and
Test 3 the temperature profiles include temperature fluctuations

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434

IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON ADVANCED PACKAGING, VOL. 25, NO. 3, AUGUST 2002

Fig. 1.

Temperature time histories used in this study.

at the highest temperature, Fig. 1(b) and (c). For each test (temperature profile) 5 specimens were used to validate the results.
Test conditions for the three tests are as follows.
Test 1: Temperature profile is between 0 C to 75 C with
30 minutes dwells on both sides of the curve.
Test 2: Temperature profile is between 0 C to 75 C with
30 min of 5 mini-cycles at 10 C on the hot side and 30
min dwell on the cold side.
Test 3: Temperature profile is between 0 C to 75 C with
30 min of 15 mini-cycles at 5 C on the hot side and 30
min dwell on the cold side.
The temperature cycling period was 70 min/cycle. Each test
was performed independently on five BGA packages, and each
sample was cycled 100 thermal cycles. For each sample the
Moir interferometry strain field measurement was performed
at every 20 cycles. SEM micrographs were taken at the beginning and the end of cycling. Moir fringes give us the inelastic
strain accumulation.

Fig. 2.

Optical setup.

elastic strains quantitatively as given in [8]

(1)
(2)
(3)

III. MOIR INTERFEROMETER

The Moir Interferometry (MI) and the imaging systems used
for sub micron displacement measurement are described in detail in [6], [7]. The fringe pattern can be related to in-plane in-

is the diswhere is the displacement in the direction;

is the horizontal fringe order,
placement in the direction.
is the vertical fringe order. In this project, each fringe
and

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DISHONGH et al.: IMPACT OF TEMPERATURE CYCLE PROFILE ON FATIGUE LIFE OF SOLDER JOINTS

Fig. 3. Four step phase shifting example (n

= 14, 1

=f

435

= 29:8 nm).

represents
m in this study. The deformation sensitivity can be improved further by introducing phase shifting
algorithms. The fringe patterns in this case can be written as
(4)
is the background illumination, is the fringe visiwhere
bility, is the phase generated by the specimen and is the
additional phase shift applied in order to extract the phase distribution. Since there are only three unknown variables, ,
and in Equation (4), three steps of phase shifting should be
sufficient to solve them completely. The optics setup of phase
shifting Moir is described in Fig. 2. Additional phase shifts
can be easily introduced by moving the beam splitting grating
in the , direction to achieve the desired amount. The improvement of sensitivity is illustrated in an example of the most basic
, /2, , and 3 /2
four step phase shifting algorithm, i.e.,
where the corresponding grating position is 0, 0.104 m, 0.208
m, 0.312 m respectively. The example fringe in Fig. 3 is of a
2.9 mm 6.3 mm area. The deformation sensitivity of the last
image is 29.8 nm, i.e., each fringe represents 29.8 nm relative
deformation. Besides the simple four-step method, there exist
many other phase shifting algorithms, such as 3 3, 7 steps,
SchwilderHariharan, Angel and Wizinowich (2 1) and Carr
etc. Different algorithms have their own advantages and disadvantages in terms of resistance to phase shifting error (vibration,
phase miscalibration, detector nonlinearity and stray light, for
instance), as well as the cost of extra instruments and the algo-

Fig. 4. Specimen on fixture.

rithm complexity. We will discuss the algorithms in detail in a

later study.
Fig. 4 shows the specimen used in this study on the fixture.
The specimen is subjected to the same boundary conditions
as the actual in-service boundary conditions. The specimen is
kept on the fixture during thermal cycling for the Moir measurements. Moir interferometry is used to record the deformation field. The typical Moir fringe patterns are shown in
Fig. 5(a)(d) for the U-field and V-field respectively. The accuracy of the Moir Interferometry measurement relies on the
initial reference field. After the optical system was aligned for
this null field, the optical system was protected from any position change by means of a register. A specimen position register was designed to ensure that the specimen always occupied
exactly the same optical space. A commercially available kinematic platform was modified to add the functionality as a position register as well as a specimen positioning platform. Two
translation stages are used to facilitate the adjustment of initial
position of the specimen on the optical table.

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436

Fig. 5.

IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON ADVANCED PACKAGING, VOL. 25, NO. 3, AUGUST 2002

Moir interferometry images: (a) U-field before cycling, (b) U-field after 100 cycles, (c) V-field before cycling, and (d) V-field after 100 cycles.

IV. RESULTS AND DISCUSSION

During testing, it was observed that the shear strain is very
large compared to peeling strain. Hence, results are shown for
shear strain only.
To extract meaningful information from the raw test data and
to find the global trend, the effect of random factors must be
minimized. Such random factors include: manufacturing defects, sample preparation, solder material itself, voids in solder
balls, etc., which results in varying solder geometry, volume,
material properties and strength of intermetallic connections.
Furthermore, the even numbered solder joints have a slightly

different configuration from the odd numbered solder joints

due to the fact that the copper connectors connected with the
neighboring solder joints are oriented in different direction.
Based on the above considerations, the test data obtained
from five samples for each test were averaged based on the
same type of cycling, the same joint number and the same
number of cycles. Comparisons of the inelastic shear strain
accumulation of the three tests from joint 1, 3, and 6 are shown
in Fig. 6(a)(c).
Fig. 6(a) shows the inelastic shear strain accumulation during
thermal cycling for solder joint 1. Results for test 1, test 2 and
test 3 are plotted in the same figure for comparison purposes.

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DISHONGH et al.: IMPACT OF TEMPERATURE CYCLE PROFILE ON FATIGUE LIFE OF SOLDER JOINTS

437

Fig. 6. Comparison of inelastic shear strain accumulation versus number of

thermal cycles for different temperature profiles at solder joints 1, 3, and 6.

Fig. 7. Inelastic shear strain accumulation versus solder joint number at

thermal cycles 20 and 100 for temperature profiles 1, 2, and 3.

The results indicate that traditional industry standard temperature profile induces higher inelastic strain than test temperature
profiles with fluctuation during the dwell time. The difference is
more pronounced between test 1 and test 3. Moreover, the differences become more distinct as the number of cycles increases.
At the end of 100 cycles, the inelastic strain level reaches an
asymptotic value for test 2 and test 3 while test 1 curve have a
much larger positive slope.
Fig. 6(b)(f) show the inelastic strain accumulation during
thermal cycling for solder joints 3 and 6. Strain is the largest in
joint 1 (outer edge joint), hence failure usually initiates at joint
1, for the configuration given in Fig. 4. Fig. 7(a)(c) shows the
averaged shear strain distribution for each test at 20 cycles and
100 cycles. It is obvious that the shear strain distribution curves
at 20 cycles and 100 cycles have a very similar shape, which
indicates a similar distribution trend. The factors affecting the
distribution of the stress and strai

n in the solder joints show their influence at the very beginning

and usually persist through the joint fatigue life. Therefore, improper packaging design or manufacturing process can be usually found at the early stage. Testing, if properly designed and
conducted, should not alter this trend significantly.
Fig. 8 gives the comparison of the maximum shear strain accumulation in the solder joints in the three tests, which shows
that test 1 has the maximum shear strain accumulation, test 2
gives the second largest, and test 3 has the smallest value.
It is very well known that creep-damage dominates the failure
mechanism and creep is the largest component of inelastic strain
in Pb/Sn solder joints [9], [10]. Creep is a plastic flow process
that occurs under constant load with no reversal in direction.
Constant shear load, which exists in the test 1 temperature profile, is reversed due to temperature fluctuations in tests two
and three. The frequency of temperature fluctuations makes a
difference in the level at which the creep process is slowed

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IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON ADVANCED PACKAGING, VOL. 25, NO. 3, AUGUST 2002

[2]

[3]

[4]
[5]
[6]
[7]
Fig. 8. Average inelastic shear strain accumulation versus number of thermal
cycles.

down. High frequency fluctuations slow down the creep process

more than low frequency fluctuations. Therefore test 3 has the
smallest inelastic strain accumulation.
Another reason for smaller inelastic strain accumulation
under temperature fluctuation could be the fact that load
reversals speed of the microstructural evolution process in the
Pb/Sn solder joint. Coarsening in solder alloys slows down
creep rate [11]. Microstructural coarsening justification needs
to be verified in the laboratory. Results of this metallurgical
finding will be the subject of another paper.
V. CONCLUSION
Results of this study indicate that industry standard temperature profiles are conservative and underestimate the fatigue life
of the BGA solder joints. From the data averaged on five samples for each test the following conclusions can be inferred.
1) Temperature fluctuations during dwell time reduces inelastic strain accumulation on the first 6 solder joints by
17.1% in test 2 and 17.9% in test 3 (averaged for six solder
joints).
2) Using minicycles during dwell time reduces the maximum inelastic strain accumulation in solder joint 1 by
14.5% in test 2, and by 23.5% in test 3.
Inelastic strain accumulation is directly proportional to fatigue life; therefore using mini-cycles increases the BGA solder
joint fatigue life in testing. Creep is the major characteristic of
eutectic solder joint damage behavior; and the temperature cycling profile (frequency and holding time) significantly affects
the creep mechanism. Most of the inelastic strain is accumulated during the first 20 cycles, the increments become smaller
and smaller through more cycles, gradually approaching a stable
pointthe upper limit.
The global inelastic strain distribution trend is similar in all
three tests. Mini-temperature cycles reduce inelastic strain accumulation. Factors affecting local variation include void, geometry, actual design layout, solder microstructure, and specimen
preparation, etc.

[8]
[9]
[10]
[11]

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3rd Int. Conf. Tech. De Connexion en Electronique. Dusselfdorf, Germany, 1986.
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Springer-Verlag, 1994.
Y. Wei, C. L. Chow, H. E. Fang, and M. K. Nielsen, Characteristics
of creep damage for 60Sn40Pb solder material, in Proc. ASME
99-IMECE/EEP-15 Conf., 1999.
C. Basaran, A comparison of viscoplastic and plastic constitutive
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Terry Dishongh received the Ph.D. degree in engineering mechanics from the
University of Arizona, Tucson, in 1996.
He is currently a Path Finding Architect with Intel Corporation, Hillsboro,
OR.

Cemal Basaran received the M.S. degree in civil engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, in 1988 and the Ph.D. degree in
engineering mechanics from the University of Arizona, Tucson, in 1994.
He joined the State University of New York at Buffalo in 1995, where he is
now an Associate Professor in the Department of Civil, Structural and Environmental Engineering. His current research interests include electronic packaging, reliability of interconnects and interface, damage mechanics, finite element method, and experimental mechanics.

Alexander N. Cartwright (M94) received the B.S. and Ph.D. degrees in electrical and computer engineering from the University of Iowa, Ames, in 1989 and
1995, respectively.
He joined the State University of New York at Buffalo in 1995, where he is
now an Associate Professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering. His
current research interests include spectroscopic characterization of semiconductor photonic devices, biophotonics, and electronic packaging.

Ying Zhao received the B.S. and M.S. degrees in geotechnical engineering from
Tongji University, Shanghai, China, in 1993 and 1996, respectively, and the
Ph.D. degree in civil engineering from the State University of New York at Buffalo in 2000.
She is currently a Senior Reliability Engineer with Analog Devices, Norwood, MA.

REFERENCES
[1] C. Basaran, C. S. Desai, and T. Kundu, Thermomechanical finite element analysis of problems in electronic packaging using the disturbed
state concept: Part I: Theory and formulation, Trans. ASME, J. Electron. Packag., vol. 120, no. 1, pp. 4147, 1998.

Heng Liu (S00) received the B.S. degree in electrical engineering from Tsinghua University, Beijing, China, in 1999 and the M.S. degree in electrical engineering from the State University of New York at Buffalo in 2001 where she
is currently pursuing the Ph.D. degree in electrical engineering.

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