Advanced Fault and Failure Anomaly Detection Technologies to Support Enhanced Prognostic and Health Monitoring (PHM) Capabilities

Solder-joint damage is accumulative and results in increased crack growth rate and in increased frequency of high-resistance spikes. These faults typically manifest themselves as intermittent, hard-to-diagnose faults in which incorrect FPGA output signals occur. These intermittent faults increase in frequency, last longer and longer and lead to persistent failure. The relative high density of the solder balls (also referred to as solder bumps) of BGA packages is a major “hard-to-diagnose” contributing factor. Ridgetop proposes to develop two innovative initial designs into prototype electronic prognostic cells to detect damage to solder-joint networks of fully operational Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs) in a ball-grid array (BGA) packages such as XILINX’s FG1156.