Reliability testing of solder joints in surface mounted assembly using real-time holographic interferometry

In this paper, a non-destructive testing (NDT) method based on the real-time holographic interferometry (RTHI) is used to investigate the dynamic out-of-plane deformation of a commercial based Surface Mounted Assembly (SMT) during power cycling. RTHI provides a precise magnitude (to the order of half the illuminating laser wavelength) to observe the out-of-plane deformation of the leaded SMT assembly, the dynamic deformation history of the assembly, and the out-of-plane deformation of the gull-wing leads and solder joints. Two hard-disk driver boards of the same model, were tested to demonstrate that the RTHI can be used as an efficient quality control tool for reliability testing of solder joints in SMT.