Interfacial fracture toughness tests suited for reliability enhancements of advanced plastic packages

The growing use of advanced electronic packages under harsh environmental conditions including extreme temperatures is often a reason for damage, fatigue and failure of entire components and systems. Therefore, their thermo-mechanical reliability is becoming one of the most important preconditions for adopting it in industrial applications. Various kinds of inhomogeneity, residual stresses from several steps of the manufacturing process as well as the fact that microelectronic packages are basically compounds of materials with quite different Young's moduli and thermal expansion coefficients contribute to interface delamination, chip cracking and fatigue of solder interconnects. This paper intends to contribute to the investigation of mixed mode interface delamination phenomena in micro components by using combined numerical investigations by means of nonlinear FEA, several fracture mechanics concepts and experimental investigations using a gray scale correlation method. Interfacial fracture toughness tests commonly utilized are investigated in order to check their characteristics and, in particular, efficiency.