Spectral-Based Fatigue Assessment Of Ball Grid Arrays Under Aerospace Vibratory Environment

Ball grid arrays (BGAs) embedded in aerospace devices should satisfy strict standards in the purpose to ensure their mechanical safety, particularly in fatigue. In fact, critical phases of BGAs service life such as launch lead to high cycle fatigue (HCF) failure due to severe random accelerations. To face this problem, designers are still using experimental qualifications based on deterministic time-domain fatigue methods. This work is motivated principally to study the applicability of the principal spectral fatigue models as cost effective alternative to assess BGA HCF. The study includes an assembly made up of a BOA chip and a support board. Finite element spectrum analysis brings out that the fatigue failure is expected to occur at different interconnect locations like for instance a critical solder joint made of a ductile tin-lead alloy. Among all the studied spectral models, it emerges that the Dirlik's fatigue prediction is the most relevant in the typical range of the solder fatigue coefficients.