A Proof Of Concept For HALT To Qualify Electronic Packaging
The Highly Accelerated Life Testing (HALT) approach was used to evaluate and refine electronic package designs for long-duration deep space missions in a broad temperature range (-150°C to +125°C) as a HALT proof of concept. HALT is a proprietary hybrid package that includes testing methodologies that include severe temperatures and dynamic shock step processing from 0 to 50g of acceleration.
The HALT testing utilized in this research employed repeated stress on test vehicle components at different temperatures to induce workmanship and/or manufacturing faults, revealing design flaws. The goal is to shorten the product development cycle time so that package design qualification may be improved. Advanced electronic package designs and surface mount technology processes, such as ball grid arrays (BGA), plastic ball grid arrays (PBGA), very thin chip array ball grid array (CVBGA), quad flat-pack (QFP), micro-lead-frame (MLF) packages, and several passive components, were used to create a test article for a variety of JPL and NASA projects. During the HALT test, these packages were daisy-chained and monitored separately. Following that, the HALT approach was used to anticipate dependability and evaluate survival of these improved packaging techniques for long-duration deep space missions in considerably shorter test periods. Advanced electronic package designs were used to construct the test items, which are thought to be beneficial in a variety of NASA projects. To ensure the individual electronic packages' continuity, all of the sophisticated electronic packages were daisychained separately.
HALT Testing
During the HALT testing, a data recording system was used to monitor the daisy chain package continuity. At temperatures ranging from +125°C to -150°C, we were able to test the boards up to 40g to 50g shock levels. At normal temperature, the HALT system can provide 50g shock levels. The test boards were subjected to a variety of conditions, including g levels ranging from 5 to 50g, test periods ranging from 10 to 60 minutes, hot temperatures up to +125°C, and cold temperatures down to -150°C. Electrical continuity tests of the PBGA package revealed an open circuit during the HALT test, but the BGA, MLF, and QFPs exhibited slight variances in electrical continuity readings. Within 12 hours of starting the expedited test, the PBGA electrical continuity issue appeared on the test board.
Electrical continuity was checked throughout each package design as similar test boards were constructed, thermal cycled separately from -150°C to +125°C, and electrical continuity was measured. After 959 heat cycles, the PBGA package on the test board displayed an unusual electrical continuity behavior. Thermal cycling alone required 2.33 hours each cycle, resulting in a total test duration until failure of 2,237 hours (or 3.1 months) for the PBGA. It took just 12 hours for the accelerated method (thermal cycling + shock) to trigger a malfunction in the PBGA electronic package. This was an acceleration of 186 times when compared to the thermal cycle alone test (more than 2 orders of magnitude). If the failure causes are comparable in both tests, this acceleration procedure may save substantial time and money when forecasting the life of a package component in a particular environment.
More Research
More research is being done to evaluate the HALT approach on a variety of additional sophisticated electrical packaging components on the test board. With this knowledge, a considerably shorter test program may be used to predict the number of mission heat cycles till failure. More research is being done to develop a systematic examination of the many components, with a consistent temperature range for both experiments. As a result, for a particular test board physical qualities, one can predict the number of hours to fail at a certain thermal and stress level.