Microscale fracture toughness degradation of notched solder microcantilevers under varied accelerated aging process

Experimental fracture mechanics at the microscale became an indispensable tool for understanding and analyzing the solder joint degradation in microelectronics packaging, which is facing severe temperature swings and is prone to failure due to the delamination induced by the microcracks. In this work, we studied the fracture behavior of the widely used Sn-based solder on microscale with the notched microcantilevers fabricated using the focused ion beam (FIB) milling. The microcantilever bending tests were performed to demonstrate the fracture process by the nanoindentation system. Besides, the continuous stiffness measurement (CSM) for the dynamic stiffness was applied to assess the crack behavior. Crack resistance was obtained from the J-Δa curves and the fracture toughness was calculated from the bending tests based on the elastic-plastic fracture mechanics. The results indicated that the fracture toughness decreased after the thermal cycling test. Compared to the specimen without aging, the resistance to rupture decreases rapidly and tends to a low variation against the increased aging cycles. Moreover, the grain orientations and dislocation densities were analyzed using electron back-scatter diffraction (EBSD). It was found that the dislocation density and misorientations of the aged specimens correlated closely to fracture toughness. Furthermore, the stress distribution of the crack tip and the deformation in the plastic zone were analyzed by the finite element simulations. This work provided new insight into the degradation of fracture and deformation behavior of solder material on microscale and revealed the relationship of crack resistance and thermal cycling aging.