White Paper
Predicting Fatigue of Solder Joints Subjected to High Number of Power Cycles
By Craig Hillman, Nathan Blattau, and Matt Lacy
Solder joint reliability of SMT components connected to printed circuit boards is well documented. However, much of the testing and data is related to high-strain energy thermal cycling experiments relevant to product qualification testing (i.e, -55 °C to 125 °C). Relatively little information is available on low-strain, high-cycle fatigue behavior of solder joints, even though this is increasingly common in a number of applications due to energy savings sleep mode, high variation in bandwidth usage and computational requirements, and normal operational profiles in a number of power supply applications.