1284 IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON COMPONENTS, PACKAGING AND MANUFACTURING TECHNOLOGY, VOL. 5, NO.
9, SEPTEMBER 2015
Statistical Variations of Solder Joint Fatigue Life
Under Realistic Service Conditions
Sa’d Hamasha, Luke Wentlent, and Peter Borgesen
Abstract— Common damage accumulation rules fail to predict
the fatigue life of solder joints under realistic service conditions
where cycling amplitudes vary over time. A modification of
Miner’s rule of linear damage accumulation has been proposed
that accounts for effects of amplitude variations in, for example,
the vibration of microelectronic assemblies with lead-free solder
joints on the average or characteristic fatigue life. We are,
however, obviously much more concerned with the first failure
across a very large sample set. Prediction of, say, the first failure
out of 10 000 or a million would require the extrapolation of
experimental failure distributions and the assumption of a shape
of this distribution. Even qualitative comparisons of accelerated
test results and their scatter should account for effects of
amplitude variations. We have argued that the long-term life
of solder joints in vibration or cyclic bending is limited by the
accumulation of inelastic work, and that much can be learned
from the low cycle fatigue behavior in shear. Individual ball grid
array scale SAC305 and SAC105 solder joints were cycled in
shear at room temperature with combinations of two different
stress amplitudes. Relying on our modified Miner’s rule and the
associated understanding of the effects of amplitude variations,
we show that the statistical uncertainty in the fatigue life of
solder joints under a specific set of realistic service conditions
must be significantly greater than measured in fixed amplitude
cycling tests. The predicted failure distribution was best fit by
a Weibull distribution over a limited range, but we argue that
the assumption of such a distribution is likely to be increasingly
conservative when it comes to the prediction of earlier failure.
Estimates are provided for the potential errors.
Index Terms— Fatigue, first failure, reliability, solder.
I. I NTRODUCTION
T HE reliability of an electronic device in realistic applica-
tions is usually limited by the fatigue failure of one of the
interconnected solder joints due to thermal and/or isothermal
cycling. The damage mechanism in thermal cycling is
completely different from that of isothermal cycling [1].
Damage in thermal cycling is controlled by the development
of a continuous network of grain boundaries across the high-
Manuscript received January 18, 2015; revised June 25, 2015; accepted
July 20, 2015. Date of publication August 6, 2015; date of current ver-
sion September 18, 2015. This work was supported in part by the U.S.
Department of Defence through the Strategic Environmental Research and
Development Program and in part by the National Science Foundation under
Grant DMR 1206474. Recommended for publication by Associate Editor
J.-H. Zhao upon evaluation of reviewers’ comments. (Corresponding author:
Sa’d Hamasha.)
The authors are with the Department of Systems Science and
Industrial Engineering, Binghamton University, Binghamton, NY 13902
USA (e-mail: shamash1@binghamton.edu; lwentle1@binghamton.edu;
pborgese@binghamton.edu).
Color versions of one or more of the figures in this paper are available
online at http://ieeexplore.ieee.org.
Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/TCPMT.2015.2460244
2156-3950 © 2015 IEEE. Personal use is permitted, but republication/redistribution requires IEEE permission.
See http://www.ieee.org/publications_standards/publications/rights/index.html for more information.
strain region (global recrystallization) followed by crack prop-
agation along this network [2]. Damage in isothermal cycling
occurs by transgranular crack growth through the bulk sol-
der [3]–[7]. This paper is relevant only to isothermal cycling.
The common approach to the assessment of fatigue life is
based on conducting an accelerated test and then extrapolating
the test results to predict the service life. The accelerated
test is usually done by applying a fixed amplitude in cycling
until failure. However, in realistic applications, electronic
assemblies are usually subjected to varying amplitude cycling
for a long period of time. The varying amplitude cycling
tends to reduce the fatigue life significantly compared with
an assessment based on fixed amplitude cycling and linear
damage accumulation rules [8]. As we shall see, it also leads
to stronger statistical variations.
Reliability models are usually used to calculate the
average or characteristic fatigue life of solder joints under
the conditions of interest. However, the major concern in
realistic applications is of course much earlier failures. This
is because, for example, an electronic product has many
thousands of solder joints and it will fail when the first
solder joint fails. Also, we are really concerned with the first
failure among a large number of such products. Prediction of
very early failure, say the first failure in millions, is almost
impossible. Instead, reliability assessments commonly rely
on the comparison of accelerated test results and their scatter
to previous products or experience. People often refer to the
time or number of cycles until 1% cumulative failure [9] but
even this is done only for the fatigue life in fixed amplitude
cycling. There has been no study addressing the statistics of
solder joint fatigue life in varying amplitude cycling.
It is common to fit experimental fatigue life data to a
Weibull distribution, but as we shall see, this cannot apply to
SnAgCu solder joints under either fixed amplitude or varying
amplitude cycling conditions. In fact, we argue that no current
statistical distribution can account for the combination of the
strong but bounded effects of Sn grain orientation and other
contributions to the statistical variations in fatigue life.
Future research to quantify and generalize effects of
Sn grain orientation together with an assumption of random
or other distributions of orientation may someday lead to a
credible means of extrapolation. For now, however, we shall
limit ourselves to showing that single amplitude cycling must
invariably lead us to underestimate the variability of life under
realistic service conditions, arguing that the assumption of
a Weibull distribution is likely to be very conservative, and
attempting to estimate the magnitude of the error.
HAMASHA et al.: STATISTICAL VARIATIONS OF SOLDER JOINT FATIGUE LIFE UNDER REALISTIC SERVICE CONDITIONS
II. S TATE OF THE A RT
Effects of varying amplitudes are commonly accounted
for through some sort of damage accumulation model. The
common fatigue life models, including Coffin-Manson, require
various assumptions but all implicitly require the validity of
Miner’s rule of linear damage accumulation [8]. Miner defined
a term called the cumulative damage index (CDI). The CDI
is the summation of damage ratios during the fatigue cycling
as in [10]
 ni
CDI = (1)
Ni
where n i is the number of cycles at a particular amplitude i and
Ni is the fatigue life for fixed amplitude cycling at amplitude i .
According to Miner’s rule, the material will fail when the
CDI equals 1. Miner’s rule is almost always the basis for inter-
pretations of random vibration test results. However, the linear
damage accumulation rule does not work for solder joints.
It breaks down for both SnPb and SnAgCu alloys, particularly
in combinations of thermal cycling and vibration [11]. It also
breaks down for preconditioning with harsh amplitude [12]
and in general varying amplitude cycling [1], [8], [13]–[16].
Recent research showed, for example, that a certain pre-
conditioning with two alternating stress amplitudes at room
temperature would reduce the remaining fatigue life of an
SAC305 solder joint by 76% while the prediction based on
Miner’s rule was a reduction of only 10% [8]. Systematic
trends show this to worsen, the greater the difference between
the amplitudes is, and orders of magnitude of error may be
common. In general, the severity of the error in a Miner’s
rule prediction of SnAgCu solder joint life depends on the
Ag content; a higher Ag content leads to a higher error [8].
The cause of the breakdown of the linear damage accumula-
tion rule is the implicit requirement that the important material
properties are the same after consumption of a given fraction
of the total life, no matter what the loading history is [17]. This
is not valid for the SnAgCu solder joints in varying amplitude
cycling, which is why the rule breaks down [8]. The interrup-
tion of cycling at a given stress amplitude with a few cycles
of higher stress amplitude leads to permanent changes in the
deformation properties as reflected in a permanent drop in the
stiffness of the solder joint [1], [8]. A forthcoming publication
will show that this is a result of diffusion creep facilitated by
the buildup of an increasingly complex dislocation network in
cycling as the amplitude is varied. There is an almost general
consensus that there is a direct correlation between the inelas-
tic energy deposition (work) and fatigue damage [18]–[20].
This has been shown to extend into the high cycle regime
where it fits the empirical Basquin relation [18], [21], [22] and
it applies when the amplitude is varied as well. The breakdown
of Miner’s rule is the consequence of the amplification of
the damage (work) accumulation in subsequent low stress
amplitude cycling because of the softening [8], [13].
The work amplification in a combination of two stress
amplitudes increases with increasing value of the higher ampli-
tude, decreasing value of the lower amplitude, and increasing
number of cycles at the higher amplitudes. As far as the latter
is concerned, the amplification increases up to 10–15 cycles,
1285
Fig. 1. Typical behavior of solder joint at the lower stress amplitude in
cycling with a combination of two stress amplitudes (16 and 24 MPa).
depending on the amplitude [8]. After that, the amplification
levels off but repeated returns to the higher amplitude lead
to additional damage amplification every time. In the case
of SnAgCu, the damage amplification is empirically found to
follow a linear relationship with the number of returns to the
higher amplitude [8].
For present purposes, we note that systematic work has
shown that the solder joint fatigue life in cycling with a
combination of two amplitudes can be accurately predicted
using a modified Miner’s rule [1], [13] based on the fatigue life
for each amplitude and on the work amplification at the mild
amplitude due to the effect of the preceding harsh amplitude
cycles [8]. Fig. 1 shows the typical behavior of a solder joint
at the lower stress amplitude in cycling with a combination
of two stress amplitudes. Initially, the work per cycle with an
amplitude of 16 MPa stabilizes rapidly but after each exposure
to a set of 3 cycles with an amplitude of 24 MPa, the work
per cycle at 16 MPa starts out elevated and then drops off
to a steady state which is still higher than before the high-
amplitude cycles. The modified Miner’s rule for a combination
of two amplitudes was proposed as [8]
s  
n in (n mi − n in ) n hi
1= (αi + bin ) + (αi + 1) +
Nm Nm Nh
i=0
(2)
where α is the slope of amplification, n mi is the total number
of cycles at low amplitude in each set, Nmi is the life at low
amplitude, n hi is the number of cycles at high amplitude, Nh is
the life at high amplitude, and i is the number of intervals.
bin is an effective amplification constant that accounts for
the stronger amplification during the first few cycles in each
low-amplitude set, and n in is the number of these cycles.
We shall take advantage of this to calculate the life in
varying amplitude cycling.
III. M ATERIAL AND M ETHODS
Individual ball grid array solder joints were cycled isother-
mally in shear fatigue using an Instron Micromechanical tester.
Load versus displacement data were recorded continuously,
generating a hysteresis loop for each cycle. Fig. 2 shows a
1286 IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON COMPONENTS, PACKAGING AND MANUFACTURING TECHNOLOGY, VOL. 5, NO. 9, SEPTEMBER 2015
Fig. 2. Schematic of the shear fatigue fixture with a solder joint.
Fig. 3. Load–displacement loops for an SAC305 solder joint cycled with
amplitudes of 15 and 24 MPa.
schematic of the shear fatigue experiment. The first few cycles
lead to limited flattening of the solder joint in the contact area,
after which no significant additional flattening is noticed and
the shear stress is concentrated in a region just above the pad
surface [17].
The present test samples were prepared from 0.75-mm
diameter solder spheres of the SAC305 and SAC105 alloys.
These spheres were soldered onto 0.55-mm diameter
copper pads on typical Ball Grid Array BGA
component substrates. The soldering was done by
printing a tacky flux through a stencil onto the
substrate pads, placing the solder balls through apertures
in a separate stencil and reflowing the component in a
nitrogen ambient with less than 50-ppm oxygen using a
Vitronics-Soltec 10-zone full convection oven. The reflow
profile had a peak temperature of 245 °C and 45–60 s above
liquidus.
Fig. 3 shows examples of load–displacement, or hysteresis,
loops for an SAC305 joint cycled with nominal stress
amplitudes of 15 and 24 MPa. The inelastic work for each
cycle was calculated from the area enclosed within the loop
using numerical integration implemented by MATLAB.
IV. R ESULTS AND D ISCUSSION
It is common for the fatigue life of SnAgCu solder joints
to vary strongly and, as we shall see, the variability gets
stronger under realistic service conditions with varying cycling
amplitude. A major part of this can be ascribed to variations in
the orientations of the strongly anisotropic Sn grains relative
to the loading direction [23], [24] and, to a lesser extent, to
Fig. 4. Weibull probability plot of the steady-state work per cycle at 16 MPa
of SAC305 solder joints.
Fig. 5. Weibull probability plot of the steady-state work per cycle at 12 MPa
of SA105 solder joints.
variations in the secondary precipitate distributions. We argue
that the dominant effect of the Sn grain orientation has
significant consequences.
Any assessment of what we really want to know, the time
to the first fatigue failure out of a very large number of solder
joints, will require the extrapolation of experimental failure
distributions and thus the assumption of a shape of the under-
lying statistical distribution. The most common assumption is
a Weibull distribution, but we shall show this not to apply.
We shall also offer some estimates of the potential errors
associated with the assumption of such a distribution.
It is in fact not uncommon for the fatigue life of a number
of solder joints on the order of 32 or more to deviate from a
two-parameter Weibull distribution. Fig. 4 shows the steady-
state work per cycle for 30 SAC305 joints cycled with a
fixed stress amplitude of 16 MPa. The results all fall within
the 95% confidence limits of a Weibull distribution with
a scale parameter of 7.4 μJ/cycle and a shape parameter
(Weibull slope) of 1.57. The steady-state work for 30 SAC105
joints cycled with a fixed amplitude of 12 MPa is consistent
with a Weibull distribution as well (Fig. 5). However, the
distribution of the inverse of a Weibull distributed parameter
is usually not consistent with a Weibull, and indeed the life
values calculated from the steady-state work per cycle are not.
HAMASHA et al.: STATISTICAL VARIATIONS OF SOLDER JOINT FATIGUE LIFE UNDER REALISTIC SERVICE CONDITIONS
Fig. 6. Correlation between the steady-state work per cycle and fatigue life
of SAC305 solder joints cycled at 16 MPa until failure.
Fig. 7. Weibull probability plot of the calculated fatigue life of SAC305
solder joints at 16 MPa.
The correlation between the average work per cycle and
the characteristic fatigue life across different stress amplitudes
is very strong [19], [20]. There is also a clear correlation
between steady-state work per cycle and fatigue life across
individual solder joints for the same stress amplitude. Fig. 6
shows an example of the correlation between steady-state work
per cycle and fatigue life for seven SAC305 solder joints
cycled with a fixed amplitude of 16 MPa until failure. In the
following, we shall therefore assess the variability in fatigue
life based on the variability in the steady-state work per cycle
and, in the case of varying amplitudes, the variability in work
amplification. Fig. 7 shows the distribution of fixed amplitude
life of SAC305 joints calculated from the work per cycle
values in Fig. 4 to systematically deviate from a Weibull.
In the case of SnPb solder, Clech et al. [25] proposed the use
of a three-parameter Weibull distribution and thus the assump-
tion of a failure free time. However, although the addition
of one more free parameter allows better fits of experimental
distributions, we shall argue against this for SnAgCu because
of the bounded effects of the Sn grain orientations.
A. Varying Amplitude
The correlation between the work per cycle and the rate of
damage was shown to apply equally well when the cycling
1287
Fig. 8. Histogram plot of the slope of work amplification α for SAC305
solder joints cycled in a combination of 50 cycles at 16 MPa and 3 cycles
at 24 MPa.
Fig. 9. Lognormal probability plot of slope of work amplification α for
SAC305 solder joints cycled in a combination of 50 cycles at 16 MPa and
3 cycles at 24 MPa.
amplitude was varied [19], [20]. However, the calculation of
life from (2) requires us to account for the work amplification.
The work amplification is calculated by dividing the work
per cycle level at the lower amplitude after each excursion
to the higher amplitude by the initial work per cycle level at
the lower amplitude before applying any excursion (Fig. 1).
As mentioned above, in the case of SnAgCu alloys the ampli-
fication factors invariably tend to follow an approximately
straight line [8], [14], so the life can be calculated from the
slope of the line α.
Alternating between 50 cycles with a relatively low
amplitude and 3 cycles with a higher amplitude, the shape
of the distribution of α (Fig. 8) was well approximated
by a lognormal distribution. Figs. 9 and 10 show
the lognormal probability plot of the slope of work
amplification α for SAC305 solder joints cycled in a
combination of 16 and 24 MPa, and in a combination of
16 and 28 MPa, respectively. Fig. 11 shows the lognormal
probability plot of the slope of work amplification for SAC105
solder joints cycled in a combination of 12 and 24 MPa.
For the purposes of calculating the effects of amplitude
variations, we note that the higher amplitude cycles did only
a minor fraction of the overall damage. As an approximation,
1288 IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON COMPONENTS, PACKAGING AND MANUFACTURING TECHNOLOGY, VOL. 5, NO. 9, SEPTEMBER 2015
Fig. 10. Lognormal probability plot of the slope of work amplification α for
SAC305 solder joints cycled in a combination of 50 cycles at 16 MPa and
3 cycles at 28 MPa.
Fig. 11. Lognormal probability plot of the slope of work amplification α for
SAC105 solder joints cycled in a combination of 50 cycles at 12 MPa and
3 cycles at 24 MPa.
Fig. 12. Steady-state work per cycle versus the slope of amplification α for
SAC305 solder joints tested in the above combination of 16 and 24 MPa.
we therefore ignore the scatter in this and take the fatigue life
at that amplitude to equal the characteristic life (N63 ). Based
on this, we then predict the remaining fatigue life of each
SAC305 solder joint at a fixed amplitude of 16 MPa after the
varying amplitude cycling.
The question arises as to whether there is a correla-
tion between the steady-state work per cycle and the work
amplification across the different joints. Fig. 12 shows
Fig. 13. Predicted remaining life of SAC305 solder joints after applying
eight repeated sequences of 10 cycles at 16 MPa and 3 cycles at 24 MPa.
the steady-state work per cycle versus the slope of work
amplification α for the 30 SAC305 solder joints tested in
the above combination of 16 and 24 MPa. It is obvious
that there is no simple correlation. The correlation coefficient
is 0.013, i.e., very close to zero. This suggests that the
statistical uncertainty in the fatigue life of solder joints under
a specific set of realistic service conditions is likely to be
significantly greater than measured in fixed amplitude cycling.
We note, however, that to the extent that the work and the
amplification both vary with Sn grain orientation and the
distribution of Ag3 Sn precipitates, albeit quite differently, they
cannot be viewed as varying independently when calculating
the variability in life.
In general, higher values for α and the steady-state work
per cycle lead to lower fatigue life for the same combina-
tion of amplitudes, and thus a greater deviation from the
Miner’s rule prediction. A previous publication showed that
the worst combination of two amplitudes where the lower one
was 16 MPa or higher would be 10 cycles at 16MPa and
3 cycles at 24 MPa [8]. According to our modified Miner’s
rule repeating this sequence eight times would lead to an
average remaining fatigue life of 22.6% of the original 16 MPa
life (N16 MPa ), while Miner’s rule predicted 89.7%. Fig. 13
shows the remaining life of the 30 SAC305 solder joints to
vary between 10% and 68% of N16 MPa . The worst samples
were the ones with a combination of relatively high steady-
state work per cycle and high slope of amplification α. Fig. 14
is the same as Fig. 12 but with the remaining fatigue life of
the worst and best solder joints indicated.
It is quite common to account for variability in a qualitative
sense by referring to the time or number of cycles until
1% cumulative failure [9]. This requires only very limited
extrapolation. Consider the example above. According to
Miner’s rule preconditioning, a large number of SAC305 joints
by applying eight repeated sequences of 10 cycles at 16 MPa
and 3 cycles at 24 MPa should reduce the average remaining
life at 16 MPa to 89.7% of the original value (N16 MPa ), and
1% of the samples should fail after 41.3% of N16 MPa . Fig. 15
shows the results from Fig. 13 plotted against the distributions
most commonly used to fit reliability data. Both the Weibull
distribution and the lognormal distribution fit the very limited
present data set very well. In fact, even a normal distribution
HAMASHA et al.: STATISTICAL VARIATIONS OF SOLDER JOINT FATIGUE LIFE UNDER REALISTIC SERVICE CONDITIONS
Fig. 14. Remaining fatigue life of the worst and best SAC305 solder joints
indicated on plot of the steady-state work per cycle versus slope of work
amplification α (Fig. 12).
Fig. 15. Statistical distribution plots of the remaining life of SAC305 solder
joints in varying amplitude cycling.
works quite well. According to the Weibull distribution 1%
of the samples should fail after a number of cycles that
corresponds to 5.6% of N16 MPa , or more than 7 times lower
than predicted by Miner’s rule. According to the lognormal
distribution, the number would be 8.9%.
We are, however, really concerned with much earlier
failures. Extrapolating the Weibull distribution in Fig. 15, we
would predict that the first failure among a million joints will
occur after 0.2% of N16 MPa (extrapolation of the lognormal
distribution would lead to 2.6% of N16 MPa , but as we shall
show below, this is likely to be optimistic). In contrast,
measuring only the life in fixed amplitude cycling without
preconditioning and assuming Miner’s rule, we would have
predicted the first failure in a million after 27.6% of N16 MPa .
The 100× difference is the result of a 4× error in the
prediction of the average remaining life because of the work
amplification effect together with an extrapolation of the
greater scatter in varying amplitude cycling.
A forthcoming publication generalizes (2) to the more
realistic case of variations between a large number of different
cycling amplitudes and thus the combined effects of large
numbers of values for the work per cycle and the slope of the
amplification factor. The fact that these all vary with Sn grain
orientation and the distribution of Ag3 Sn precipitates offers
1289
Fig. 16. Histogram plot of the remaining life as a number of cycles calculated
using Monte Carlo simulation.
Fig. 17. Weibull probability plot of the remaining life as a number of cycles
calculated using Monte Carlo simulation.
hope that this will not lead to an even stronger scatter, but
that will have to be experimentally ascertained.
B. Statistical Distribution
Actually, even if the fatigue life distribution at fixed ampli-
tude was in fact Weibull, the remaining life at fixed amplitude
after amplitude variations cannot be. As we shall see, this
would be so even if the slope of the work amplification α
also followed a Weibull distribution. Importantly, we argue
that neither parameter can in fact be Weibull distributed.
A Monte Carlo simulation was first conducted to evaluate
the statistical distribution of the remaining life assuming that
the Weibull distribution fits the fatigue life at a fixed amplitude
of 16 MPa with a shape parameter of 3.82 and a scale para-
meter of 1734 (Fig. 7) and that the Lognormal distribution fits
the slope of the work amplification with a location parameter
of −1.601 and a scale parameter of 0.6373 (Fig. 9). For
each distribution, 10 000 data points were randomly generated
using the Minitab software, and then the remaining life was
calculated. This implicitly assumes that the two factors vary
independently, something which we argue is unlikely. Fig. 16
shows a histogram plot of the remaining life calculated using
Monte Carlo simulation. Fig. 17 shows a Weibull probability
1290 IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON COMPONENTS, PACKAGING AND MANUFACTURING TECHNOLOGY, VOL. 5, NO. 9, SEPTEMBER 2015
Fig. 18. Lognormal probability plot of the remaining life as a number of
cycles calculated using Monte Carlo simulation.
plot of the results, and Fig. 18 shows the lognormal probability
plot. It is obvious that the lognormal distribution does not
fit the remaining life data at all. In fact, extrapolations of
experimental data would greatly overestimate the time to
first failure in a million. Nevertheless, such an extrapolation
would still predict a remaining life at that level 14 times
shorter than predicted based on Miner’s rule. The Weibull
distribution does fit the data better, but even the time to first
failure out of 10 000 falls far outside the confidence limits and
the distribution underestimates it by 2–3×. Extrapolating this
Weibull distribution to the first failure among a million joints,
we would predict a 240-times shorter remaining life than based
on Miner’s rule.
In general, the life in varying amplitude cycling can thus
not be Weibull distributed. Fig. 17 might, however, seem to
suggest that extrapolations of accelerated test results based on
a Weibull distribution would be conservative as long as work
amplification effects are properly accounted for in the test.
This is indeed likely considering the effects of microstructure
on the statistics.
There is in fact no chance that either the work or the
work amplification continues to follow a Weibull or a
lognormal distribution across a large number of joints.
Realistic SnAgCu solder joints are each formed in a single
solidification event during cool-down from reflow and end
up with either a single Sn grain or, through cyclic twinning,
three Sn grain orientations at 60° from each other [26].
The Sn grain structure is extremely anisotropic, providing
for major joint-to-joint variations in properties [23]. Not
surprisingly, both the isothermal and the thermal fatigue life
vary strongly with the orientation relative to the loading
direction [7], [27]. Specific Sn grain orientations thus exist
for which the fatigue life would be the highest and lowest,
i.e., the effects of orientation must be bounded.
For a given Sn grain orientation, or combination of three
orientations, the properties of a SnAgCu solder joint are
largely determined by the average spacing between the
secondary Ag3 Sn precipitates [28]. These are established
at the time of solidification after substantial undercooling,
and as the solidification front moves much faster at lower
temperatures [29], [30] the precipitate density varies with the
solidification temperature. The nucleation of solidification is a
stochastic event, providing for statistical variations in the solid-
ification temperature and thus in the joint properties. This not
only leads to variations in the work per cycle, and thus the life
in fixed amplitude cycling, but amplification factors in varying
amplitude cycling were smaller for lower-Ag alloys [8] so both
work and amplification vary with the precipitate spacing.
Importantly, the dependence on solidification temperature
also leads to systematic effects of joint size [31], pad finish,
and cooling rate [32] from reflow. Even simple engineering
tests focused on qualitative comparisons between designs,
processes, materials or just with previous experience should
thus consider statistical scatter as well as characteristic life,
keeping in mind that aging leads to precipitate coarsening
and thus variations in scatter as well as characteristic life
too [33], [34].
Although the strong but bounded variation of work and
amplification factors with Sn grain orientation must be
combined with effects of independent variations in precipitate
distributions and perhaps other factors such as joint shape,
there is no realistic chance that the resulting life-time
distribution is Weibull shaped.
We finish with a rough assessment based on the extreme
assumption that the statistical variations are completely
dominated by the effects of Sn grain orientation. This
provides for an overly optimistic prediction of the time to first
failure. Neither of the data sets in Figs. 4 and 9 does of course
include the absolutely worst orientation, but a forthcoming
paper [24] shows both the work per cycle and the amplification
to vary systematically with the distance to available slip
planes, and we have no reason to expect a particularly extreme
sensitivity to orientation near the worst one. We, therefore,
also assume the worst case values to be well approximated
by the maximum (99%) values in the figures. We then ignore
the fact that although there was no obvious correlation
between the work per cycle and the slope of the amplification
(Fig. 12) they cannot be considered independent (the maxima
are not likely to occur for the same orientation) and use
these to predict the number of cycles to first failure out
of 10 000 joints. Based on this, we reach an upper limit
on the remaining life of 3.7% of N16 MPa . At the other
extreme, assuming nonbounded distributions for the work and
amplification factors in the Monte Carlo simulations above led
to a conservative value of 1.2% (Fig. 17), i.e., the true value
is expected to fall between 1.2% and 3.7% of N16 MPa . Using
a Weibull distribution to extrapolate experimental test results
to the first failure out of 10 000 would thus have provided
a conservative estimate 2–6× below the actual remaining
life. Of course the error is likely to increase strongly when
extrapolating to earlier failure than that.
V. C ONCLUSION
The actual concern in fatigue life prediction of lead-free
solder joints in realistic applications is the first failures out
of a very large number of joints. Any assessment of this
would require the extrapolation of an experimental failure
distribution and the assumption of a shape of this distribution.
HAMASHA et al.: STATISTICAL VARIATIONS OF SOLDER JOINT FATIGUE LIFE UNDER REALISTIC SERVICE CONDITIONS
In reality, this is rarely attempted. Instead, comparisons
between alternative materials, designs, or processes, or com-
parisons with previous products or experience, usually rely
on values for the characteristic or average life together with
a qualitative measure of statistical variations. A common
measure is the slope (shape factor) of the cumulative failure
distribution on a Weibull plot.
Previous research has shown the importance of accounting
for the effects of amplitude variations when predicting or
just comparing the characteristic life of SnAgCu solder joints
under realistic service conditions. The present results show
that in addition to a major reduction in characteristic life,
any variations in amplitude also lead to significantly increased
scatter and thus even stronger reductions in the predicted
time to first failure. The sensitivity to variations varies with
alloy, solder joint dimensions, pad finish, rate of cool-down
from reflow, and overall thermal history (subsequent reflows
and aging), so accelerated test protocols may need to address
variations.
As for extrapolations, the Weibull distribution does not
account for the bounded effects of Sn grain orientations
and appears to offer conservative estimates of the life to
first failure. The error in estimates of the first failure out of
10 000 joints was 2–6× and it is expected to increase rapidly
toward earlier failure.
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Sa’d Hamasha, photograph and biography not available at the time of
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