Numerical Simulation of a Wire Bond Shear Test Using Nonlinear Adaptive Remeshing

The shear test is typically being used to quantify the interconnect quality of wire bonds. Besides the pull test, the shear test is more relevant to quantify the mechanical stability of the interface region of wire bond and chip/substrate metallization. The criteria for these tests are collected in the DVS-2811 [1], [2]. These are widely used in the industry and accepted for common wire materials. Due to higher lifetime requirements of wire bonds especially in power electronics, new materials and material combinations are developed and already in use [3]-[7].The focus of this work is on aluminum wires. Some of these materials show very promising results in lifetime testing (temperature cycling) but do not show reasonable results considering the shear test. Therefore, this work is giving an insight into the shear test method using advanced numerical simulation methods.