Experimental and analytical study of geometry effects on the fatigue life of Al bond wire interconnects

The reliability of power electronic devices is mainly limited due to thermo-mechanical fatigue of the internal bond wire interconnections. The bond wire shape is already defined at the design stage of the device. Thus preliminary lifetime assessments become more and more important in order to satisfy the high quality demands and the short time to market of the devices. In this study a fast experimental test setup is used in order to determine the lifetime of a large number of wire bond shapes. Furthermore an analytical model is applied to calculate optimized wire bond shapes for a given set of parameters. The results of this investigation should help to optimize the shape parameters at an early stage of development using the presented analytical model in combination with the fatigue tests. © 2013 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.