Characterization of micro-crack propagation through analysis of edge effect in acoustic microimaging of microelectronic packages

• Acoustic simulation and finite element modelling of micro-crack propagation in flip chip packages.
• Micro-crack propagation characterization through the analysis of edge effect.
• A feature Dip-Y is extracted from C-scan images of solder joints.
• Investigate the relationship between the feature and the crack sizes.
• Experiments are carried out to verify the proposed technique.

The miniaturization and three dimensional die stacking in advanced microelectronic packages poses a big challenge to their non-destructive evaluation by acoustic microimaging. In particular, their complicated structures and multiple interfaces make the interpretation of acoustic data even more difficult. A common phenomenon observed in acoustic microimaging of microelectronic packages is the edge effect phenomena, which obscures the detection of defects such as cracks and voids.In this paper, two dimensional finite element modelling is firstly carried out to numerically simulate acoustic microimaging of modern microelectronic packages. A flip-chip with a 140 µm solder bump and a 230 MHz virtual transducer with a spot size of 16 µm are modelled. Crack propagation in the solder bump is further modelled, and B-scan images for different sizes of micro-cracks are obtained. C-line plots are then derived from the simulated B-scan images to quantitatively analyze the edge effect. Gradual progression of the crack is found to have a predictable influence on the edge effect profile. By exploiting this feature, a crack propagation characterization method is developed. Finally, an experiment based on the accelerated thermal cycling test is designed to verify the proposed method.