Technical Articles From Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE)

A Review and Analysis of Automatic Optical Inspection and Quality Monitoring Methods in Electronics Industry

Jun 27, 2022 | Abd Al Rahman M. Abu Ebayyeh, Alireza Mousavi,

Electronics industry is one of the fastest evolving, innovative, and most competitive industries. In order to meet the high consumption demands on electronics components, quality standards of the products must be well-maintained. Automatic optical inspection (AOI) is one of the non-destructive techniques used in quality inspection of various products. This technique is considered robust and can replace human inspectors who are subjected to dull and fatigue in performing inspection tasks. A fully automated optical inspection system consists of hardware and software setups. Hardware setup include image sensor and illumination settings and is responsible to acquire the digital image, while the software part implements an inspection algorithm to extract the features of the acquired images and classify them into defected and non-defected based on the user requirements. A sorting mechanism can be used to separate the defective products from the good ones. This article provides a comprehensive review of the various AOI systems used in electronics, micro-electronics, and opto-electronics industries. In this review the defects of the commonly inspected electronic components, such as semiconductor wafers, flat panel displays, printed circuit boards and light emitting diodes, are first explained. Hardware setups used in acquiring images are then discussed in terms of the camera and lighting source selection and configuration. The inspection algorithms used for detecting the defects in the electronic components are discussed in terms of the preprocessing, feature extraction and classification tools used for this purpose. Recent articles that used deep learning algorithms are also reviewed. The article concludes by highlighting the current trends and possible future research directions....

Board-Level Thermal Cycling and Drop-Test Reliability of Large, Ultrathin Glass BGA Packages for Smart Mobile Applications

Aug 22, 2018 | Bhupender Singh, Gary Menezes, Scott McCann, Vidya Jayaram, Urmi Ray, Venky Sundaram, Raj Pulugurtha, Vanessa Smet, Rao Tummala

Glass substrates are emerging as a key alternative to silicon and conventional organic substrates for high-density and high-performance systems due to their outstanding dimensional stability, enabling sub-5-µm lithographic design rules, excellent electrical performance, and unique mechanical properties, key in achieving board-level reliability at body sizes larger than 15 × 15 mm2.

This paper describes the first demonstration of the board-level reliability of such large, ultrathin glass ball grid array (BGA) packages directly mounted onto a system board, considering both their thermal cycling and drop-test performances....

Microspring Characterization and Flip-Chip Assembly Reliability

May 29, 2014 | B. Cheng, D. De Bruyker, C. Chua, K. Sahasrabuddhe, I. Shubin, J. E. Cunningham, Y. Luo, K. F. Böhringer, A. V. Krishnamoorthy, E, M. Chow

Electronics packaging based on stress-engineered spring interconnects has the potential to enable integrated IC testing, fine pitch, and compliance not readily available with other technologies. We describe new spring contacts which simultaneously achieve low resistance (< 100 mΩ) and high compliance (> 30 μm) in dense 2-D arrays (180 ~ 180-µm pitch). Mechanical characterization shows that individual springs operate at approximately 150-µN force. Electrical measurements and simulations imply that the interface contact resistance contribution to a single contact resistance is < 40 mΩ. A daisy-chain test die consisting of 2844 contacts is assembled into flip-chip packages with 100% yield. Thermocycle and humidity testing suggest that packages with or without underfill can have stable resistance values and no glitches through over 1000 thermocycles or 6000 h of humidity.

This paper suggests that integrated testing and packaging can be performed with the springs, enabling new capabilities for markets such as multichip modules....

A System Level Electrostatic Discharge Protection Modeling Methodology for Time Domain Analysis.

Apr 03, 2014 | Nicolas Monnereau, Fabrice Caignet, David Trémouilles, Nicolas Nolhier, Marise Bafleur.

A system level modeling methodology is presented and validated on a simple case. It allows precise simulations of electrostatic discharge (ESD) stress propagation on a printed circuit board (PCB). The proposed model includes the integrated circuit (IC) ESD protection network, IC package, PCB lines, passives components, and externals elements. The impact of an external component on the ESD propagation paths into an IC is demonstrated. Resulting current and voltage waveforms are analyzed to highlight the interactions between all the elements of an operating PCB. A precise measurement technique was designed and used to compare with the simulation results. The model proposed in this paper is able to predict, with good accuracy, the propagation of currents and voltages into the whole system during ESD stress. It might be used to understand why failures occur and how to fix them with the most suitable solution....