A Basic Study on Creep-Fatigue Damages Interaction for Sn-3.0Ag-0.5Cu as Lead Free Solder Material Available to Purchase

Sn-Ag-Cu solder materials have been widely used for the mount process of electronics devices or semiconductor packages on print circuit board (PCB). The solder joints are sometimes opened under thermal cyclic loads as low cycle fatigue phenomenon. The fatigue life of solder joint has been investigated by many researchers with experimental and numerical methods. Generally, the induced thermal stress in solder joints should be relaxed as soon and creep damage is considered to be ignored in order to estimate lives of joints. However, it is probable that long term stress is applied to solder joints by the elastic follow-up phenomenon which are depending on the stiffness ratio between solder joints and the electronics device, because the elastic strain in PCB or the electronics device shifts to creep strain in solder joints gradually during a long time. Then the creep damage of solder joint should be counted for the mechanical design of mounted PCBs. And it is known that the interaction between creep damage and fatigue damage significantly shorten the life. In this study, it was discussed whether the interaction between fatigue damage and creep damage has to be considered or not for the mechanical design of the lead free solder joint with basic creep-fatigue tests at an elevated temperature.