Failure Mechanism and Root Cause Analysis of UBGA Solder Ball Contamination

A comparison of the electrical performance and effect of different types of flux to Micro Ball Grid Array (ìBGATM) solder ball quality was conducted. The units using no clean flux were found to exhibit opens failures during off-board testing and programming. Initial analysis conducted showed that the failures were due to contact problems between the solder balls and the test/programming sockets resulting from the presence of a transparent residue on the solder balls. In-depth failure analysis, in parallel with experiments conducted in the assembly line, was performed to determine the root cause of the solder ball contamination. Three failure analysis techniques were employed, namely: Scanning Electron Microscopy (SEM), Energy Dispersive Xray Analysis (EDX), and Fourier Transform Infrared (FTIR) Spectroscopy. An initial experiment was conducted to isolate the cause of the contamination by examining the different modules in the ìBGATM assembly. Failure analysis and experimental data proved that the opens failures were due to the no clean flux residue that was deposited on the surface of the solder ball after the reflow process.