Aging of epoxy moulding compound — Thermomechanical properties during high temperature storage

Abstract

It is well known that epoxy moulding compound (EMC) plays an important role in the reliability of electronic packages. In order to predict the mechanical behaviour of electronic packages that are encapsulated with moulding compound, the material properties of EMCs should be carefully characterized and modelled. Currently, more and more components are exposed to severe environments. Among these, high temperature conditions can lead to irreversible changes in EMCs. These changes can be attributed to chemical processes such as oxidation and can lead to degradation of the applied resins, which we refer to here as aging. As a result, the thermo-mechanical properties of the EMCs change severely with time. Due to ongoing changes in the aging EMC of a package, the stress and strain distributions in the package change with time, while embrittlement affects the fracture strength. As a consequence, the long-term reliability of a package is severely affected. Since an appropriate constitutive representation of the material properties of the slowly growing oxidation layers is not available, it is cumbersome to predict the reliability of real packages for long term applications. Being motivated by this limitation, in the present work, we focus on the experimental characterization as well as on the numerical modelling of aging of EMCs at high temperature storage (HTS). As a result the long term stress-strain distribution of a package can be simulated.