The goals of the present paper are to develop and demonstrate an efficient technique for the design/analysis of electronic packages through a novel decomposition procedure. The ultimate utility of these techniques is to enable quick and accurate design decisions at system-level, during package development by enabling one to develop a reusable library of modules in a manner analogous to the object-oriented programming paradigm of modern computer science. The methodology allows simultaneous design as well as domain decomposition and is based on a nonlinear optimization procedure that ensures the approximate satisfaction of the principle of virtual work. The developed procedure is demonstrated on a $5×5$ hypothetical arrayed package. It is shown that with the use of the decomposed solution methodology, approximately 350 percent improvement in computational efficiency is achieved at an accuracy loss of only 6 percent. A windows-based graphical program founded on an artificial neural network model for predicting life given shear and axial deformation of solder joints was also developed. This neural network encapsulates the results of finite element analyses and predicts life for a given loading in a fraction of a second. [S1043-7398(00)00201-2]

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