Electrochemical Migration: Evaluating the Effect of Fe2O3 Nanoparticle Incorporation on the Reliability of SAC Alloys

The effect of incorporating Fe2O3 nanoparticles on the reliability of SAC305 solder alloy from the perspective of electrochemical migration (ECM) behavior was investigated through water drop (WD) tests conducted in a 0.1 M NaCl solution under a bias voltage of 10 VDC. The reliability analysis of the WD test findings unveiled that the lifetime outcomes for the examined alloys conform to a well-defined two-parameter Weibull distribution. The addition of Fe2O3 nanoparticles at varying weight percentages (0.1%, 0.25%, and 0.5%) to SAC305, denoted as nanocomposite SAC305-x(0.1, 0.25, 0.5 wt.% Fe2O3), led to a lower mean time to failure (MTTF) compared to pure SAC305. This outcome suggests a disadvantageous effect of incorporating Fe2O3 nanoparticles into SAC305 in terms of ECM performance. Scanning electron microscopy (SEM) revealed a dendritic morphology characterized by straight and perpendicular branching (fishbone-like) in the nanocomposite solder alloys while energy dispersive spectroscopy (EDS) identified Sn as the predominant element in the dendrites, indicating that the ECM characteristics of nanocomposite solders are still primarily driven by the dissolution of Sn.