Implementation of No-Flow Underfills on Chip Scale Packages
Chip Scale Package (CSP) technology is growing at a rapid pace since its emergence in the electronics
manufacturing industry. As the solder joint size decreases,it has become apparent that underfill is necessary to meet
certain reliability standards with CSPs,specifically drop testing. The need to underfill the CSP package has exerted
the same drawbacks that are involved in flip chip assembly. No-flow underfills pose potential in this area as they can
be incorporated into the standard SMT process with no post reflow processing. Most new materials simultaneously
reflow and cure in the same reflow process used for standard SMT solder pastes. This work presents a reliability
study of several commercial no-flow underfills and compares these CSPs to CSPs assembled without underfill and
CSPs assembled with conventional fast-flow,snap-cure underfills. Samples were built using solder paste only,flux
only,combinations of conventional underfill and solder paste or flux,and no-flow underfills. The reliability tests
include liquid-to-liquid thermal shock (-40oC to 125oC) and board level drop tests (6-feet). Samples assembled with
underfilled were benchmarked against the samples that were not underfilled. The CSP test vehicles consisted of a
printed circuit board with 10 CSPs having 84 I/O and a 0.5-mm pitch. Through these tests,it has been determined
that no-flow underfills can pass over 1000 cycles in liquid-liquid thermal shock,the typical standard for
package/product qualification. Samples assembled with no-flow underfills also exhibited an increase in reliability
during drop testing as compared to non-underfilled samples. The reliability data shows that no-flow underfill
implementation on CSP increases reliability as compared to non-underfilled samples.