Damage mechanics modeling of concurrent thermal and vibration loading on electronics packaging

The problem of concurrent thermal and vibration loading has not been thoroughly studied even though it is common in electronic packaging applications. Here we attempt to address such a problem using a damage mechanics based constitutive model. Damage mechanics constitutive model for eutectic Pb/Sn solder alloys is used to simulate the damage effects of concurrent cyclic thermal loads and vibrations on Ball Grid Array (BGA) packages. The model is implemented into the commercial finite element code ABAQUS through its user defined material subroutine capability. For the integration algorithm we have used a return mapping scheme, which dramatically improves the convergency rate as compared to previous implementations of the same model. Results are examined in terms of accumulation of plastic strain within the solder connections. It is shown that the simplistic Miner’s rule can not accurately account for the combined effect of both loadings acting concurrently.