Reliability issues of lead-free solder joints in electronic devices

Nan Jiang; Liang Zhang; Zhi-Quan Liu; Lei Sun; Wei-Min Long; Peng He; Ming-Yue Xiong; Meng Zhao

doi:10.1080/14686996.2019.1640072

Reliability issues of lead-free solder joints in electronic devices

Sci Technol Adv Mater. 2019 Jul 11;20(1):876-901. doi: 10.1080/14686996.2019.1640072. eCollection 2019.

Authors

Nan Jiang¹, Liang Zhang^{1

2}, Zhi-Quan Liu³, Lei Sun⁴, Wei-Min Long⁵, Peng He², Ming-Yue Xiong¹, Meng Zhao¹

Affiliations

¹ School of Mechatronic Engineering, Jiangsu Normal University, Xuzhou, China.
² State Key Laboratory of Advanced Welding and Joining, Harbin Institute of Technology, Harbin, China.
³ Institute of Metal Research, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Shenyang, China.
⁴ National Key Laboratory of Science and Technology on Helicopter Transmission, Nanjing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics, Nanjing, China.
⁵ State Key Laboratory of Advanced Brazing Filler Metals and Technology, Zhengzhou Research Institute of Mechanical Engineering, Zhengzhou, China.

Abstract

Electronic products are evolving towards miniaturization, high integration, and multi-function, which undoubtedly puts forward higher requirements for the reliability of solder joints in electronic packaging. Approximately 70% of failure in electronic devices originates during the packaging process, mostly due to the failure of solder joints. With the improvement of environmental protection awareness, lead-free solder joints have become a hot issue in recent years. This paper reviews the research progress on the reliability of lead-free solder joints and discusses the influence of temperature, vibration, tin whisker and electromigration on the reliability of solder joints. In addition, the measures to improve the reliability of solder joints are analyzed according to the problems of solder joints themselves, which provides a further theoretical basis for the study of the reliability of solder joints of electronic products in service.

Keywords: 103 Composites; 106 Metallic materials; 201 Electronics / Semiconductor / TCOs; 212 Surface and interfaces; 40 Optical, magnetic and electronic device materials; 503 TEM, STEM, SEM; IMC; Lead-free solder; crack; failure; reliability.

Publication types

Review

Grants and funding

This work was supported by the the National Key R&D Program of China [2017YFB0305700]; the Key project of State Key Laboratory of Advanced Welding and Joining [AWJ-19Z04]; International Cooperation Project [2015DFA50470]; the Qing Lan Project, Six talent peaks project in Jiangsu Province [XCL-022]; Natural Science Foundation of China [51475220].