Analysis of solder fatigue in electronic packaging using a mesh-insensitive structural stress method

Solder fatigue is one of the major product reliability concerns in electric packaging design. In this paper, the application of a mesh-insensitive structural stress method, previously developed by the authors, is demonstrated for characterizing fatigue of solder joints under thermal fatigue and mechanical fatigue conditions. Three sets of experimental data from literature are analyzed to demonstrate the effectiveness of the structural stress method in its ability to correlate test data over different packaging designs, test methods, etc. As evidenced in this study, the mesh-insensitive structural stress method offers a simple but effective means to correlate the fatigue behavior of solder joints among various test conditions. The results show that the structural stress method can be used as an effective alternative to existing methods in the literature, in reliability design of electronic packaging.