Test Structures as a Way to Evaluate Packaging Reliability

Extract

Electronics packaging has always accounted for about 50% of reliability shortcomings in electronics systems. Materials, processes, and geometries used in microelectronics packaging are quickly evolving to meet the commercial challenge for more reliable, lighter, smaller, cheaper devices, and lower power consumption. Amid the rapid evolution, methodology and metrology to measure package reliability and materials aging properties must be standardized to allow quantitative technology comparisons.

What Is Packaging?

For most purposes packaging can be thought of as everything involved in making an electronics system except the wafer fabrication. For example, all the design, fabrication, assembly, and finishing that goes into interconnecting the integrated circuits, discrete devices, resistors, and capacitors and then interfacing the system to the user is traditionally called “packaging.”