Highly Accelerated Life Test for the Reliability Assessment of the Lead-Free SMT Mainboard

The highly accelerated life test (HALT) has been widely used in the industry to evaluate the reliability and qualification of electronic products. However, no lifetime prediction of product will result from this method and it is merely an index of product quality. In this paper, several procedures have been proposed to improve the HALT in order to provide life-time prediction of products. For the migration of the use of solder-joint materials from solder with lead to lead-free solder, there are many uncertainty factors that influence the reliability of the electronic products assembled by surface mount technology (SMT). Therefore, the HALT can be used to quickly evaluate the lead-free SMT mainboard. The difference between the current and new HALT procedures will be compared and discussed in this study