Board-level Reliability Performance Comparison of Thin and Thick Ni plating ENEPIG Laminate LGA and BGA Packages

Abstract

In the electronic packaging industry, for the past few decades, ENEPIG(Electroless Nickel Electroless Palladium Immersion Gold) plating method has been already widely used for substrates of many different LGA and BGA packages. However, because of chronic quality issues of laminate manufacturing process such as discoloration and corrosion induced from very long process time of Nickel layer plating process, there is a strong demand from laminate substrate suppliers of changing the Nickel layer thickness range from thick 3∼8um to thin 0.08∼0.2um, In this study, we tried to verify the board level reliability performance of Thin Nickel plating ENEPIG laminate packages, comparing with current Thick Nickel plating ENEPIG laminate packages, also compared the performance between LGA and BGA packages.