Establishing the interfacial fracture properties of Cu-EMC interfaces at harsh condition

Delamination in interfaces is one of the failure modes in microelectronic products. In order to be able for judging the risk of interface fracture, the critical interfacial fracture properties should be established. Moisture, temperature and mode mixity have significant effect on the interfacial toughness. Dealing with the moisture effect the highest temperature was limited to 100°C. This limitation is quite restrictive for the application of the obtained critical fracture data for reliability studies of microelectronic packages. This is because of the fact that for pre-moisturized microelectronic packages the interface delamination failure often occurs above this temperature limit. The present research focused on the establishing the critical interfacial fracture properties of epoxy molding compound-copper leadframes in the pressurized steam condition i.e. temperature larger than 100°C and 100% RH. Dealing with it, a special steam chamber is designed and developed. The setup is completed by installing a CCD camera for tracking the crack growth along the interface.