Wire bond degradation under thermo- and pure mechanical loading

This paper presents a fundamental study on degradation of heavy Al bond wires typically used in high power modules. Customized samples are designed to only consist of Al bond wires on standard Si diodes. These samples are subjected to pure mechanical and passive thermal cycling to investigate the bond degradation behavior on a simple system as well as compare these two test methods. Although an appreciable difference in fracture behavior is observed between these two methods, both provide correlation between the number of cycles and degree of degradation, especially in the case of the passive thermal test. To enable investigation of degradation rate a large number of bond interfaces is analyzed and they are found to follow conventional accepted fracture laws like Paris-Erdogan. With additional work this could enable the possibility of obtaining empirical parameters to be used in actual physics based lifetime laws.