Multi-level modeling of woven glass/epoxy composite for multilayer printed circuit board applications

The objective of this paper is to develop a hybrid homogenization method to predict the elastic properties of a common woven glass/epoxy composite substrate for multilayer circuit board applications. Comprehensive high resolution 3D finite element (FE) models of a quarter of the repeated unit cell (RUC) for the woven glass/epoxy composite were developed based on different micromechanical schemes. . Specifically, four different micromechanics schemes were investigated: self-consistent, Mori-Tanaka, three-phase approach and composite cylinder assemblage (CCA). The element based strain concentration matrices were determined and used to obtain the homogenized woven glass/epoxy composite properties via a specially developed MATLAB code. Attention was further devoted to the predictions of the homogenized elastic moduli of the multilayer printed circuit board (PCB). The results from our simulations, based on Mori-Tanaka and CCA, are in good agreement with existing experimental results, indicating that the newly proposed homogenization scheme can be used as a design tool to predict the overall properties of woven composite materials typically used in multilayer PCB applications.