Impact of Temperature Cycle Profile on Fatigue Life of Solder Joints

In 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 Moiré 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.