Solder joints in surface mounted IC assemblies: Relief in stress and warpage owing to the application of elevated stand-off heights

The head-in-pillow (HnP) defects in Ball-Grid-Array (BGA) packages with leadfree solders and particularly in packages with fine ball pitches are attributed by the numerous investigators to three major causes: manufacturing process, solder material properties and design-related issues. The latter are thought to be caused mostly by warpage of the PCB-package assembly. In this analysis the warpage issue is addressed using an analytical predictive stress model. It is assumed that it is the difference in the post-fabrication deflections of the warped package and its PCB that are the root cause of the observed HnP defects. The calculated data suggest that the replacement of the conventional BGA design with a design with elevated stand-off heights of the solder joints, such as, eg, column-grid-array (CGA), could reduce the product’s propensity to warpage-related HnP defects. It is shown that, owing to the greater longitudinal interfacial compliance of the system employing solder joint interconnections with elevated standoff heights, significant stress relief and considerable decrease in the relative PCB vs. package warpage can be expected. In the carried out numerical example the effective stress in the solder material is relieved by about 40% and the difference between the maximum deflections of the PCB and the package is reduced by about 60%, when the conventional BGA design is replaced by the CGA system. There is a reason to believe that the application of BGA joints with CGA designs could result in a substantial improvement in the IC product’s reliability, including the it’s propensity to possible HnP defects. The stress model used in this analysis is a modification and extension of the model developed by the author back in mid-eighties. These models shed light on the underlying materials physics of the solder joint interconnections in surface mounted devices.