Published in Proceedings of the 44th International Symposium on
Microelectronics: Long Beach, CA, October 9, 2011. Copyright ©
2011 International Microelectronics and Packaging Society. One
of the challenges in an experimental study of solder joint
reliability is to determine when cracks occur in a solder joint
or when a solder joint fails. Cracks in a real solder joint are
difficult to identify using an X-Ray system. Cross-sectioning
and scanning electron microscopy (SEM) is a destructive method.
A common non-destructive test method is to monitor resistance
increase in a solder joint or a daisy-chain. However, no
scientific research has been done in establishing the
relationship between the crack area of an interconnection and
the change in resistance of the interconnection. This paper
proposes a method of defining failure criteria as the resistance
increase in a solder joint exceeding a threshold. The threshold
is determined by k times the range over the natural variation in
resistance measured by a measure