Integrated transient thermal and mechanical analysis of molded PBGA packages during thermal shock

During thermal shock, large thermal gradients exist within a molded plastic ball grid array (PBGA) package. The conventional assumption of uniform temperature distribution becomes invalid. In this paper, an integrated thermal-mechanical analysis was performed to evaluate the transient effect of thermal shock. For comparison, an isothermal analysis was also conducted. The computational fluid dynamics (CFD) method was used to obtain the thermal boundary conditions surrounding the package. The heat transfer coefficient obtained through CFD was compared to two analytical solutions. It was found that the analytical values were not acceptable in the time period of interest. Therefore, to obtain the actual maximum die stress, CFD solution has to be used instead of analytical solutions to derive the thermal boundary condition. This boundary condition was then applied to the package and a sequentially coupled heat transfer and thermal stress analysis was performed. The transient analysis has shown that high stresses occur in the die due to thermal shock, which can not be seen under the traditional isothermal assumption. The impact of plastic ball grid array (PBGA) package parameters on transient die stress was also studied, including mold thickness and substrate thickness. The results in this paper could be applied to either wire bond or flip-chip PBGA packages.