Thermally Induced Delamination Buckling of a Thin Metal Layer on a Ceramic Substrate

Interface delamination failure caused by thermomechanical loading and mismatch of thermal expansion coefficients and other material properties is one of the important failure modes occurring in electronic packages, thus a threat for package reliability. To solve this problem, both academic institutions and industry have been spending tremendous research effort in order to understand the inherent failure mechanisms and to develop advanced and reliable experimental and simulation methodologies, thus to be able to predict and to avoid interface delamination before physical prototyping. Various damage mechanisms can be involved and can result in interface delamination phenomena. These are not all sufficiently addressed and/or reported so far, probably because of the complexities caused by the occurrence of strong geometric and materials nonlinearities. One of the phenomena being insufficiently understood so far is the so-called buckling-driven delamination of thin metalic layers on ceramic substrates. This phenomenon will be discussed in the present paper.