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Thermo-mechanical reliability is one major issue in solid-state lighting. Mismatches in the coefficients of thermal expansion (CTE) between high-power LED packages and substrates paired with temperature changes induce mechanical stress. This leads to a thermal degradation of LED modules by crack formation in the solder interconnect and/or delamination in the substrate, which in turn increases junction temperature and thus decreases light output and reduces lifetime. To investigate degradation and understand influence of LED package design and solder material, a reliability study with a total of 1800 samples − segmented in nine LED types and five solder pastes − is performed. First of all, in this paper a state-of-the-art review of high-power LED packages is performed by analyzing and categorizing the packaging technologies. Second, the quality inspection after assembly is realized by transient thermal analysis (TTA), scanning acoustic microscopy (SAM) and X-ray. For TTA, a new method is introduced to separate the thermal resistance of the LED package from solder interconnect and substrate by applying the transient dual interface method (TDI) on samples with different solder interconnect void ratios. Further measurement effort is not required. The datasheet values for thermal resistance are verified and the different LED package types are benchmarked. The void ratio of the solder interconnects is determined by X-ray inspection combined with an algorithm to suppress disruptive internal LED package structures. TTA and TDI revealed that initial thermal performance is independent of solder paste type and that voiding is more critical to smaller LED packages. In addition, lower silver proportion in the paste is found to increase voiding. SAM is less sensitive for initial void detection than X-ray, but it’s applied to monitor crack propagation while aging in combination with TTA. The results of the reliability study, i.e., the crack growth under temperature shock test for the different SAC solders, will be presented in a second independent paper.
The thermo-mechanical fatigue of different SAC+ solders is investigated using transient thermal analysis (TTA) and predicted using artificial neural networks (ANN). TTA measures the thermal impedance and allows detection of solder cracks and delamination of material interfaces. LEDs soldered to printed circuit boards using seven different solders were aged within passive air-to-air temperature shock tests with TTA measurements every 50 cycles with the increase of the thermal resistance as failure criterium. A SnAgCuSb solder showed the best performance improvement over the SAC305 reference under the test conditions. In addition to standard evaluation by the cumulative failure-curve and Weibull plot, new approaches for reliability assessment are investigated to assess the reliability of the solder joint of the individual LEDs. A hybrid approach to predict failures in the solder joints of the individual LEDs during accelerated stress testing is set-up which processes the TTA data using artificial neural networks with memory, specifically LSTM, where the memory allows full use of the measurement history. Two ANN approaches, regression and classification, are used. Both approaches are shown to be quite accurate. The greater information gained from the regression approach requires more processing using external knowledge of the problem requirements, whereas the categorical approach can be more directly implemented. The results demonstrate the advantages of integrated approaches for assessment of the remaining useful life of solder joints.