Effect of Corner Staking on the Fatigue Life of BGA Under Thermal Cycling

Solder interconnects in electronic assemblies are susceptible to failures due to environmental high strain rate impact and cyclic stresses. To mitigate the failures, adhesive bonds can be added after the solder assembly process to provide additional mechanical support. For ball grid array (BGA) packages, the adhesive is normally applied to the corners of the package and referred to as corner staking. In addition to corner staking, underfill is also a strategy used to mitigate the stresses on the solder joints. While components with underfill has been widely studied, the study of the impact of corner staking on the reliability of packages remains limited. This paper presents a study of corner-staked BGA packages with tin-3.0 silver-0.5 copper (SAC305) solder subjected to temperature cycling. Experimental temperature cycling is conducted to examine impact of the selected corner staking material on the fatigue life of BGAs. Further, finite element analysis is conducted to understand the influence of material properties of staking material on the fatigue life of BGAs. The result of the study indicates that the presence of corner staking, with selected material properties, reduces the damage on the solder joints under thermal cycling, and thus increases its fatigue life by about 80%. This paper may serve as a guidance for staking material selection to improve the fatigue life of solder joints of BGAs under thermal cycling.