Solder joint lifetime model using AI framework operating on FEA data

Abstract

The thermo-mechanical reliability of electronic systems is often limited by the crack growth within the solder joints. Addressing this issue requires careful consideration of the design of the package and solder pads. Finite Element Analysis (FEA) is widely used to predict crack growth and to model their lifetime. Traditionally, FEA post-processing methods rely on human expertise to select appropriate regions for evaluating plastic and creep strain at critical locations and correlating these values with experimental data using the Coffin-Manson equation, which predicts fatigue lifetime based on cyclic plastic strain. This study introduces a novel method for FEA post-processing of surface-mounted devices (SMD) on printed circuit boards (PCB) using artificial intelligence. The method transforms the FEA data into a 2D grid map of creep strain values and employs a Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) for automatic feature extraction. Afterwards, a fully connected layer correlates the extracted features with the experimental measured solder joint lifetime, effectively capturing nonlinear relationships.

The study focuses on the development of the concept of crack formation in the solder interconnects of ceramic based high-power LED packages used in the automotive industry for headlights. The validated FEA model is based on an extensive data set of 1800 LED packages including seven different ceramic-based LED packages and five different solders. The design of the ceramic LED package covers two-pad and three-pad footprint for soldering and thin film and thick film metallized ceramic carriers. Results show a strong agreement (R² Score is 99.867 %) between simulations and experimental data for ceramic LED packages. This automatic feature extraction from FEA data sets a new benchmark for improving solder reliability predictions, and it has proved to be better than established methods for lifetime prediction of solder joints.