Toolbox for detection of mechanical and thermo-mechanical stress in electronic components

This paper reports the development process of a measurement system for mechanical stress detection. A piezoresistive silicon sensor chip is used to convert the inducted mechanical stress into a resistance change, measured by a developed resistance analyzer. Aim of our work was to simplify the sensor chip for high flexibility in design and adaption. The sensor chip can easily adapt to a device under test and can be conditioned to perform long-term, in-situ measurements of mechanical stress in electronic components and packages. Therefore all sensor intelligence packed in the resistance meter unit. This is controlled by a specialized software program. To increase the measuring accuracy all resistors measured by the Four-Point-Method with modified routing layout. Given that, up to 96 resistive signals can be measured. Though the modular design, the whole system gains high flexibility in respect of the application field.