Head-on-Pillow Defect Detection: X-Ray Inspection Limitations

Both the number and the variants of ball grid array packages (BGAs) are tending to increase on network printed board assemblies with sizes ranging from a few millimeter die size wafer level packages with low ball count to large multidie system-in-package (SiP) BGAs with 60–70 mm side lengths and thousands of I/Os. One big challenge, especially for large BGAs, SiPs, and for thin fine-pitch BGA assemblies, is the dynamic warpage during the reflow soldering process. This warpage could lead to solder balls losing contact with the solder paste and its flux during parts of the soldering process, and this may result in solder joints with irregular shapes, indicating poor or no coalescence between the added solder and the BGA balls. This defect is called head-on-pillow (HoP) and is a failure type that is difficult to determine. In this study, x-ray inspection was used as a first step to find deliberately induced HoP defects, followed by prying off of the BGAs to verify real HoP defects and the fault detection correlation between the two methods. The result clearly shows that many of the solder joints classified as potential HoP defects in the x-ray analysis have no evidence at all of HoP after pry-off. This illustrates the difficulty of determining where to draw the line between pass and fail for HoP defects when using x-ray inspection.