Predicting the Liquid Formation for the Solder Joints in Flip Chip Technology

2005 ◽  
Vol 128 (4) ◽  
pp. 331-338 ◽  
Author(s):  
Wen-Hwa Chen ◽  
Shu-Ru Lin ◽  
Kuo-Ning Chiang

An accurate and efficient analytical geometric method is presented for predicting the geometric parameters of the controlled collapse chip connection type solder joint using direct chip attach technology after a reflow process. By this method, the meridian of the solder joint is first discretized as a series of sufficiently fine fragmental arcs. After calculating the internal pressure inside the molten eutectic solder from the forces balance, the meridional and circumferential radii of curvature of each arc are then obtained from the Laplace-Young equation. As a result, the coordinates of each node of the arc and the solder joint geometry can be determined in turn. The factors that affect the final shape of the molten eutectic solder joints, including the solder volumes, external loading, pad size, surface tension of molten eutectic solder, and interfacial surface tension between the molten eutectic solder and the solid high-lead bump are considered herein. The results computed by the analytical geometric method are also compared with those obtained using the Surface Evolver program, the extended Heinrich’s model, and the experimental results. The results of the various approaches are mutually consistent.

2004 ◽  
Vol 126 (1) ◽  
pp. 22-25 ◽  
Author(s):  
Li Ming Yu ◽  
Bang Han Sur ◽  
Kim Young Pyo ◽  
Wang Chun Qing ◽  
Zhang Lei

Solder bridging is one of the most serious defects of solder joint in fine pitch device assemblies. It is known that the generation of solder bridging is closely related to the forming process of solder joints. To simulate the process, a 3D model is formed. Then it is numerically simulated using Surface Evolver program. Based on the results, the solder bridging mechanism and the effective factors including wetting angle and surface tension are investigated.


2014 ◽  
Vol 2014 (1) ◽  
pp. 000100-000106
Author(s):  
Tom Colosimo ◽  
Horst Clauberg ◽  
Evan Galipeau ◽  
Matthew B. Wasserman ◽  
Michael Schmidt-Lange ◽  
...  

Advancements in electronic packaging performance and cost have historically been driven by higher integration primarily provided by fab shrinks that has followed the well-known Moore's law. However, due to the tremendous and continuously increasing cost of building new fabs, the performance/cost improvements achieved via node shrinks are negated. This leaves packaging innovation as the vehicle to achieve future cost-performance improvements. This has initiated a More-than-Moore idea that has led to vigorous R&D in packaging. Advanced packages which employ ultra-fine pitch flip chip technology for chip-to-substrate, chip-to-chip, or chip-to-interposer for the first level interconnect have been developed as an answer to obtaining higher performance. However, the costs are too high as compared to traditional wire bonding. The status today is that the fundamental technical hurdles of manufacturing the new advanced packages have been solved, but cost reduction and yield improvements have to be addressed for large-scale adoption into high volume manufacturing. In traditional flip chip assembly silicon chips are tacked onto a substrate and then the solder joints are melted and mass reflowed in an oven. This mass reflow technique is troublesome as the pitch of the solder bumps become finer. This is due to the large differences in the thermal expansion coefficient of the die and the substrate, which creates stress at the solder joints and warpage of the package when the die and substrate are heated and cooled together. To mitigate and resolve this issue, thermo-compression bonders have been developed which locally reflow the solder without subjecting the entire substrate to the heating and cooling cycle. This requires that the bondhead undergo heating past the melting point of solder and then cooling down to a low enough temperature to pick the next die from the wafer that is mounted to tape. Machines in the market today can accomplish this temperature cycle in 7 to 15 seconds. This is substantially slower than the standard flip chip process which leads to high cost and is delaying the introduction of these new packages. This paper shows a flip chip bonder with a new heating and cooling concept that will radically improve the productivity of thermo-compression bonding. Data and productivity cycles from this new bond head with heating rates of over 200°C/sec and cooling of faster than 100°C/sec are revealed. Experimental results are shown of exceptional temperature accuracy across the die of 5°C throughout the cycle and better than 3°C at the final heating stage. The high speed thermo-compression bonds are analyzed and the efficacy of the new concept is proven. Excellent temperature uniformity while heating rapidly is an absolute necessity for enabling good solder joints in a fast process. Without good temperature uniformity, additional dwell times need to be incorporated to allow heat to flow to all of the joints, negating any benefits from rapid heating. Whereas the current state-of-that-art is often to program temperature in steps, this bonder can be commanded and accurately follows more complex temperature profiles with great accuracy. Examples of how this profiling can be used to enhance the uniformity and integrity of the joints with non-conductive pastes, film, and without underfill along with the associated productivity improvements will be shown. Tests that show portability across platforms that will lead to set up time and yield improvements and are identified and quantified. Additionally new ideas for materials and equipment development to further enhance productivity and yield are explored.


Author(s):  
Debabrata Mondal ◽  
Abdullah Fahim ◽  
KM Rafidh Hassan ◽  
Jeffrey C. Suhling ◽  
Pradeep Lall

Abstract Lead-free solder joints are the most widely used interconnects in electronic packaging industries. Usually solder joints in most of the electronic devices are exposed to an environment where variation of temperature exists, which indicates cyclic thermal loading to be a very common type of external loading. Moreover, due to difference in the coefficient of thermal expansion (CTE) among dissimilar contact materials, shear stress develops in junctions under thermal loading, which significantly deteriorates the overall reliability. Hence, characterization of lead-free solder materials under thermal loading is essential to predict the performance and deformation behavior of joints in practical applications. A significant portion of the studies in this field are concerned with thermal loading of lead-free solder interconnects, each of which has a very small diameter, in sub-millimeter range. Although the solder balls have very small dimensions, most of the analyses considered them as a bulk material with homogeneous and isotropic properties. However, with the decrease of specimen dimensions, size effects and material directionality play a significant role in deformation mechanisms. Since a very few grains exist in a small specimen, individual grain properties play a vital role on overall material response. Therefore, modeling from the grain structure and orientation point of view could be an effective and more accurate way to predict solder joint deformation behavior under thermal loading. In this study, the effect of grain size and orientation of SAC305 is investigated for predicting anisotropic behavior of solder joints under thermal load. A simplified three-dimensional model of beach-ball configuration solder joint was generated and simulated using ABAQUS finite element (FE) software. Experimentally obtained directional properties such as elastic modulus and CTE were assigned to the computational geometry to create material anisotropy. The effects of material anisotropy were studied for varying grain size specimens, as well as for specimens with varying grain orientation.


1999 ◽  
Vol 124 (1) ◽  
pp. 37-44 ◽  
Author(s):  
Wen-Hwa Chen ◽  
Kuo-Ning Chiang ◽  
Shu-Ru Lin

This study presents an efficient method to accurately predict solder joint geometry after a reflow process. The proposed method can be utilized for Solder Mask Defined (SMD), Non-Solder Mask Defined (NSMD), or C4 type solder joints. The reflow process involves several design factors capable of influencing the final shape of the molten solder joint, such as solder joint volume, restoring force, surface tension, contact angle, pad thickness, and pad size. These factors are all considered in the calculations. The computed results are compared with those using the Surface Evolver program and also with available numerical/experimental results. Their excellent agreement shows that the method developed herein can be practically applied to predict the reflow shape of SMD/NSMD solder joints. The difference between SMD and NSMD is also examined in detail. Results in this study provide designers with a fundamental guideline for accurately predicting the liquid formation of solder joints during the reflow process.


2008 ◽  
Vol 44-46 ◽  
pp. 905-910 ◽  
Author(s):  
Yu Dong Lu ◽  
Xiao Qi He ◽  
Yun Fei En ◽  
Xin Wang

In advanced electronic products, electromigration-induced failure is one of the most serious problems in fine pitch flip chip solder joints because the design rule in devices requires high current density through small solder joints for high performance and miniaturization. The failure mode induced by electromigration in the flip chip solder joint is unique, owing to the loss of under bump metallurgy (UBM) and the interfacial void formation at the cathode contact interface. In this study, Electromigration of flip chip solder joints has been investigated under a constant density of 2.45×104 A/cm2 at 120 °C. The in-situ marker displacements during the electromigration test was measured and found to show a rough linear change as a function of time. Scanning electron microscopic images of the cross section of samples showed the existence of voids at the interface between Al interconnection and under bump metallurgy. The void movement was matched with the marker displacements during the electromigration test, and voids moved to the cathode interface between Al interconnection and under bump metallurgy in the downward electron flow (from chip to substrate) joint. The mechanism of electromigration-induced void migration and failure in the flip chip are discussed. During electromigration, a flux of atoms is driven from the cathode to the anode or a flux of vacancies in the opposite direction. It can lead to two possible mechanisms of void migration. First, if we regard the void as a rigid marker of diffusion, it will be displaced towards the cathode by the atomic flux in the electromigration, Second, if we consider surface diffusion on the void surface, electromigration will drive atoms on the top surface of the void to the bottom surface of the void, and consequently the void will move towards the cathode.


1990 ◽  
Vol 112 (3) ◽  
pp. 219-222 ◽  
Author(s):  
S. M. Heinrich ◽  
N. J. Nigro ◽  
A. F. Elkouh ◽  
P. S. Lee

In this paper dimensionless design curves relating fillet height and length to joint cross-sectional area are presented for surface-mount solder joints. Based on an analytical surface tension model, the advantage of these dimensionless curves is that they may be used for arbitrary values of solder density and surface tension. The range of applicability of previously developed approximate formulae for predicting joint dimensions is also investigated. A simple example problem is included to illustrate the use of both the design curves and the approximate formulae.


2015 ◽  
Vol 27 (4) ◽  
pp. 178-184 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ye Tian ◽  
Justin Chow ◽  
Xi Liu ◽  
Suresh K. Sitaraman

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to study the intermetallic compound (IMC) thickness, composition and morphology in 100-μm pitch and 200-μm pitch Sn–Ag–Cu (SAC305) flip-chip assemblies after bump reflow and assembly reflow. In particular, emphasis is placed on the effect of solder joint size on the interfacial IMCs between metal pads and solder matrix. Design/methodology/approach – This work uses 100-μm pitch and 200-μm pitch silicon flip chips with nickel (Ni) pads and stand-off height of approximately 45 and 90 μm, respectively, assembled on substrates with copper (Cu) pads. The IMCs evolution in solder joints was investigated during reflow by using 100- and 200-μm pitch flip-chip assemblies. Findings – After bump reflow, the joints size controls the IMC composition and dominant IMC type as well as IMC thickness and also influences the dominant IMC morphology. After assembly reflow, the cross-reaction of the pad metallurgies promotes the dominant IMC transformation and shape coarsened on the Ni pad interface for smaller joints and promotes a great number of new dominate IMC growth on the Ni pad interface in larger joints. On the Cu pad interface, many small voids formed in the IMC in larger joints, but were not observed in smaller joints, combined with the drawing of the IMC growth process. Originality/value – With continued advances in microelectronics, it is anticipated that next-generation microelectronic assemblies will require a reduction of the flip-chip solder bump pitch to 100 μm or less from the current industrial practice of 130 to150 μm. This work shows that as the packaging size reduced with the solder joint interconnection, the solder size becomes an important factor in the intermetallic composition as well as morphology and thickness after reflow.


2019 ◽  
Vol 16 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-12 ◽  
Author(s):  
Thomas F. Marinis ◽  
Joseph W. Soucy

Abstract In surface mount assembly, advantage is taken of the high surface tension of molten solder to self-align ball grid array packages and flip chip die. However, in these applications, the volume of solder applied as paste by stencil printing is not sufficiently well controlled to achieve the precise alignment required for optoelectronic devices. We believe that the requirement on solder volume control for assembly of optoelectronic devices can be relaxed by designing the bond pads so that the height or alignment of connections is controlled by the surface tension of the solder rather than its volume. Our design approach to accomplishing this is to connect auxiliary pads to the primary attachment pad, which act as solder reservoirs. Surface tension causes the solder to be redistributed among these pads to achieve a uniform pressure throughout the solder volume. This phenomena is governed by the Young-Laplace equation, ΔP = γκ, in which ΔP represents the difference in pressure within and outside the solder, γ the surface tension of the solder, and κ the local curvature of the solder surface. Thus, the design of the set of primary and auxiliary pads is critically important to realizing the desired control of joint height. In this article, we describe the use of the Surface Evolver software package in combination with analytical models, to analyze the behavior of various connection configurations with respect to variations in printed solder volume. Specifically, we calculate the equilibrium shape of the solder surface over the connected set of pads and examine how control of joint height is affected by the number, size, and geometry of auxiliary pad configurations.


2020 ◽  
Vol 32 (3) ◽  
pp. 147-156
Author(s):  
Muhammad Naqib Nashrudin ◽  
Zhong Li Gan ◽  
Aizat Abas ◽  
M.H.H. Ishak ◽  
M. Yusuf Tura Ali

Purpose In line with the recent development of flip-chip reliability and underfill process, this paper aims to comprehensively investigate the effect of different hourglass shape solder joint on underfill encapsulation process by mean of experimental and numerical method. Design/methodology/approach Lattice Boltzmann method (LBM) numerical was used for the three-dimensional simulation of underfill process. The effects of ball grid arrays (BGA) encapsulation process in terms of filling time of the fluid were investigated. Experiments were then carried out to validate the simulation results. Findings Hourglass shape solder joint has shown the shortest filling time for underfill process compared to truncated sphere. The underfill flow obtained from both simulation and experimental results are found to be in good agreement for the BGA model studied. The findings have also shown that the filling time of Hourglass 2 with parabolic shape gives faster filling time compared to the Hourglass 1 with hemisphere angle due to bigger cross-sectional area of void between the solder joints. Practical implications This paper provides reliable insights to the effect of hourglass shape BGA on the encapsulation process that will benefit future development of BGA packages. Originality/value LBM numerical method was implemented in this research to study the flow behaviour of an encapsulation process in term of filling time of hourglass shape BGA. To date, no research has been found to simulate the hourglass shape BGA using LBM.


Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document