AN EXPERIMENTAL-STUDY OF POPCORNING IN PLASTIC ENCAPSULATED MICROCIRCUITS

A potential reliability problem in plastic encapsulated microcircuits Is moisture-induced popcorning, which can arise during the reflow proc ess, This article describes an experimental setup that is used to rapi dly assess the moisture sensitivity of plastic encapsulated microcircu its and classify them based an The Institute for Interconnecting and P ackaging Electronics Circuits (IPC) and Joint Electron Device Engineer ing Council (JEDEC) guidelines, Experimental results are then presente d which show that only one of the three reflow cycles specified as par t of the current guidelines is necessary, The study then presents the role played by the die and die attach material in popcorning, Finally, this study suggests an alternate technique to deter popcorning-the us e of optimum temperature ramp rates in board assembly.