Reliability Analysis of Printed Circuit Boards Based on a Physics of Failure Simulation Method

Printed Circuit Board (PCB) plays an essential role as a basic unit of electronic products to realize certain functions. Therefore, it is necessary to evaluate its reliability in an accurate way to promote the design improvement for electronic products. In this paper, a Physics of Failure (PoF) based reliability simulation on a PCB product is carried out by using the RISA-PofEra software developed by Beihang University, China. During the simulation analysis, thermal and vibration stress profiles over the PCB were exerted to provide inputs of a couple of PoF models for the reliability calculations of semiconductor devices on that PCB. Meanwhile, with the consideration on geometrical uncertainties in semiconductor packages, the Meantime Time to Failure (MTTF) of the PCB is calculated from the lifetimes of its weakest semiconductor device by using a Monte-Carlo method.