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Component Moisture Question?
Board Talk
TranscriptPhil And welcome to Board Talk with Jim Hall and Phil Zarrow, of ITM Consulting, although we're affectionately known as The Assembly Brothers in this venue. Today we're coming to you from the ITM Elegante Ball Room high atop Mt. Rialto and we're here to talk about electronic assembly. Materials, equipment, components, practices, procedures, and whatever else comes to mind. I believe today Jim, we have a component procedure related question. Jim Yes this is from M.M. We mistakenly assembled circuit boards using BGA components that were not properly stored. The BGA components had moisture tags that show indication of moisture exposure. All the assemblies passed testing. Can we now rebake the assemblies to ensure that they will not have moisture related failures on these devices, or should we remove and replace the suspect BGA components? Phil I think this is a case of closing the barn door after the horse is out, or the BGA is out. Am I correct? Jim Absolutely Phil. This is a classic example of MSD potential damage. A part was not stored properly. It was exposed to moisture. We didn't realize it. We reflowed it. The answer to your first question is no. Rebaking at this point will do nothing to help that part. The damage occurs during reflow if there's too much moisture in there it can crack, delaminate and all the other bad things we know that can happen to the internal structure of moisture sensitive components. So no. The question is, you say all the assemblies passed testing so there's no dead in the water failures. Was there any damage inside the parts? The best way to look for the most common types of moisture sensitive damage, which is cracking and delamination, is using scanning acoustic microscopy. Better known as C-SAM. It's a non-destructive test. If you have it available, it's not real expensive or time consuming and again you can find it if you do the parts that are suspect you can see a lot of the typical kinds of damage. You may want to x-ray them to look for potential cracks in wire bonds that may not have been caught during your quality testing for be it in-circuit or functional. But, otherwise yeah, pull off all the parts and replace them. Good luck and you've learned, as my brother said, you've got to follow these procedures. Phil I just want to add that a lot of people feel that if they didn't get corner lifting on the corner bonds of the component that they're free and clear. We want to point out that the popcorn effect doesn't always occur. That sometimes you don't get enough belly bulge during the reflow expansion to actually lift the corner leads. So just because you haven't lifted the corner leads doesn't mean those symptoms my brother Jim has mentioned aren't there. Jim Yes, the scariest thing about moisture sensitivity damage is that we have no idea how big the problem is. Because if as Phil just illuminated, if you don't get this catastrophic pop-corning during reflow that lifts the corner, that cracks the packages, or we've seen actually parts being blown right off the surface of the circuit board, you can get situations where they look okay, they test okay but you've got some latent damage inside that has reduced the reliability of the product and you get failure in start-up, burn-in, early infant mortality, or worst of all intermittent. Because you've got some delamination that's not a failure but the part overheats or you get some connections that aren't reliable and you get intermittence. Typically if they've gotten out of the factory very few people die and fault analyze to the internal component level. So think about all the intermittent problems that are out in the field. Some percentage of those are probably due to moisture sensitivity damage during reflow in assembly. But we have no idea how much or how big the problem is. So keep those moisture sensitive parts in their moisture barrier bags or in their dry cabinets. Keep track of them and don't put them on a board if you're not sure. Bake the parts before you reflow them. Baking them after reflow does no good whatsoever. Phil You have been listening to Board Talk and whatever you do ... Jim Don't solder like my brother. Phil Don't solder like my brother either. |
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