Effect of thermocapillary action in the underfill encapsulation of multi-stack ball grid array

Recent trend in electronic industries are demanding smaller chip packaging process along with increase in performance and reliability of the package. The introduction of Multi-stack Ball Grid Array (BGA) to enhance the performance of the conventional BGA flip chip has frequently encountered several hitches such as extended filling time and incomplete filling at the upper layer of the multi-stacks BGA. It has been found that the encapsulant lacks energy to flow at the upper layer due to lower hydrostatics pressure. In this paper, a straightforward solution by incorporating additional thermal energy in the encapsulant to increases its flow ability is introduced. This additional thermal energy at the upper layer produces a distinct temperature difference between the upper and lower layers, or simply thermal delta. This research attempts to demonstrate the effectiveness of thermal delta in solving the aforementioned flow problem during encapsulation process of multi-stacks BGA, by means of experiment and numerical simulation. The findings have shown that the experimental data compares well with the simulation results. It was also found that the implementation of thermal delta substantially reduces the filling time across the multi-stack packages. This study reveals the potential of thermocapillary-driven underfill encapsulation being widely adopted in future industrial encapsulation of multi-stacks BGA packaging.