Plastic Package Reliability (Part 1 of 3)

Today, plastic packaged integrated circuits are ubiquitous even for high-reliability applications. Reliability testing and standards play a key role in reliability engineering to achieve the necessary reliability performance. Traditional stress-based standards are easy to use but often over- or under-stress units and don’t focus on key vulnerabilities, particularly moisture-related ones. Knowledge-based standards have evolved to fix this, but rely on knowledge of mechanisms, control of board manufacturing conditions, and understanding and specifying end use conditions. This motivates a survey of plastic package mechanisms and testing with particular focus on moisture-related mechanisms and testing. The moisture-related examples will cover HAST testing, and the “popcorn” mechanism.