Research on the fault diagnosis technology of intermittent connection failure belonging to FPGA solder-joints in BGA package

A new method to detect intermittent faults in FPGA (field programmable gate array) of BGA (ball grid array) packages is presented. Inject proper current into measured IO port via sensor circuit, the intermittent faults will arouse impedance of the solder-joint to change intermittently, the voltage of solder-joint will also change intermittently, the fault information can be obtained through regulating the voltage signal. Compared with current monitoring method based on degradation model, this scheme is more reliable and accurate. It can prevent the catastrophic faults caused by failure of the FPGA solder-joints effectively, as well as economize the maintenance cost.