A new drop test vehicle for a uniform shock response

JEDEC test board is widely used in the industry to calibrate the drop performance of solder joints in BGA and other area array components. In the JEDEC test board, 15 components are usually mounted and the drop test is performed at an acceleration, typically 1500g. One main drawback for this test vehicle is that the strain of solder joint during the drop test is not uniform across all 15 components. This makes statistical and quantitative analysis of the drop test results impossible unless a large number of sample size is used. This paper proposed a smaller and square board with 4 components mounted. The finite element analysis (FEA) has shown that the solder joint strain is uniform for all components. This is very attractive as it would improve the efficiency of drop test drastically and make all data points meaningful.