Interconnect Reliability of Low Temperature Solder for Potential Application in Enterprise Computers, Portable, and Automotive Electronics

Excessive CO
2
emission in the atmosphere has been proved to cause extreme weather events such as heavy rain, violent storm, droughts and heat waves. Recent study from Max Plank Institute for Biogeochemistry, Germany
¹
indicates the extreme events not only cause suffers in the whole ecosystems but also create more CO
2
emission to form a climate change vicious circle due to self-reinforcing effect. Reducing CO
2
emission is the most urgent endeavor in environmental protection to ensure the sustainability of tour planet ecosystems. Reducing CO
2
emission through alternative material application such as lower soldering temperature can be a potential major contribution from electronic industry. iNEMI Board Assembly Technical Roadmap
²
of 2017 predict that the low temperature soldering (LTS) usage will increase to 20 plus percent by 2027. The drivers for this LTS technology trend are three folds, the energy and CO
2
emission reduction, overcome material limitation in electronic component and PCB, and low soldering process to match with electronic miniaturization.This article is part 1 of a series of study on new low melting temperature solder interconnect application and reliability on various product categories, enterprise computers such as server and storage, AIO (all-in-one desk top), POS (Point of Sale), tablet, and automotive electronics. First, the raw LTS SnBiAg material properties range from power particle size, Halogen content, flux characterization, viscosity, wetting, SIR, Electrochemical migration etc. are assessed. Then five product emulators are selected as test vehicle to represent the broad scope of various electronics products. Due to the nature of brittleness of Bi contain in the LTS as shown in earlier publications
^2,3
the material drop cycle to failure reliability of LTS is substantially below current SAC305 which widely used in various electronics. Mechanical strengthening mechanism such as corner bonding material is attached along the BGA to observe the susceptibility of mechanical shock in later two product emulators, tablet and automotive electronics.Since all BGA incoming with solder composition are in SAC305 nowadays there is a backward compatibility issue with new LTS. Inhomogeneous microstructure as well as potential solder defect was observed in SEM micrograph. Experiment of adding various LTS paste volume so as different Bi percentage in mixed alloy join are studied to see crack propagation and failure interface due to Bi diffusion and intermetallic compound formation when product emulator subject to accelerated stress test. While observe the crack propagation in microstructure, potential strengthening mechanism such as solid solution, precipitation hardening and phase size refinement can be determined in the of SAC and LTS mixed and Bi percentage variation alloy.Finally BFT (board functional test) will be conducted in between accelerated thermal and mechanical cycling test to offline but real-time monitoring the reliability of solder joint of passive, PTH, BGA of active IC and CPU. The benefit of using product emulators with BFT is an advantage in the transition of LTS from SAC.