Comparative Study on Reliability and Advanced Numerical Analysis of BGA Subjected to Product-Level Drop Impact Test for Portable Electronics

In this paper, drop reliability of various PBA (printed board assembly) mounting structures is investigated and compared. Then, we built SAC305 (Sn3.0Ag0.5Cu) interconnects for BGA (ball grid array) package failure model to evaluate the drop impact reliability of handheld devices. In order to simulate actual behavior of the solder joint under the drop impact load of handheld devices, we perform explicit full FEA (finite element analysis) modeling. However, this takes a lot of computing time because of the large aspect ratio of element size between solder joints and other structures such as PCB (printed circuit board) and electronic packages. Therefore, an effective way to represent solder interconnects for FEA is needed which would be relatively simpler yet detailed. Comparable board-level drop tests are conducted after equipping test vehicles with various fixtures considering PBA mounting structures, which make it possible to apply different loading conditions to BGA packages. The results show different drop impact life for solder interconnects depending on the mounting design of the PBA. Particularly, the solder interconnect of the component located at the middle of the PCB exhibits the shortest impact life where the highest tensile stress occurs. Also, the mounting design restraining PBA deflections shows better reliability under the drop impact loading. Sequentially, simulating with a PBA composed of the BGA package and the PCB is considered to assess the feasibility of the solder ball failure modeling when the drop impact load is applied. Especially, for the modeling of the solder balls, detailed solid model and simple beam model are compared regarding computational efficiency and numerical accuracy. We found that the simple beam model significantly shortens computational time from 110 h to less than an hour. Accordingly, the feasibility of the beam model for the solder balls is shown by correlating the stress level and the drop impact life obtained from the experiments.