HIGH-RELIABILITY

PCB DESIGN TIPS

FOR AEROSPACE
AND OTHER HARSH
ENVIRONMENTS
TABLE OF CONTENTS
1. Quality and Reliability

2. Maintaining Connectivity

3. Temperature Issues

Thermal Expansion

Via Failures

Vias and Pads

4. Solder

5. Summary

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 3, 2, 1
...LIFTOFF
Harsh-environment and
high-reliability engineering
often go hand-in-hand.
Whether a sensor package is placed on
an airplane, a spacecraft, or down the
borehole of a wellhead, the cost of failure
can often be measured in hundreds of lives
or millions of dollars lost.

For these situations, engineers have to pay

particular attention to design choices. The
following article presents solder and via
considerations for your next design.

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QUALITY &
RELIABILITY
When a Printed Circuit Board is manufactured by an accredited
facility, an employee is assigned the task of ensuring the board
meets or exceeds expectations in all aspects of the design:
plating thickness, surface finish, planarity, etc.… These are
measurable, quantifiable metrics, and the board either meets
them, or it does not. The PCB manufacturer’s responsibility for
quality usually ends the moment the PCB is delivered to and
accepted by the customer. At delivery, 100% of the boards are
expected to function as designed.

Reliability covers the lifecycle of the product from delivery to

dumpster -- and it is a much harder metric to quantify because
board failure dates are unknown and variable. Several factors
affect reliability, including PCB design, manufacturing process
control, and material variability. Even if the design follows all
best practices, and the processes are carried out flawlessly,
there is always a bit of material variability that introduces
slight variations to manufactured printed circuit boards. This
variability, along with poor design choices and poor process
control, can hide latent defects inside a design.

Quality is easy to determine -- either the board meets

specifications, or it does not. Reliability is hard -- because a
board might fail 1-year, 5-years, or 20-years into its service life.

Unless your printed circuit board operates unprotected in an

environment of salt-spray and hydrofluoric acid, the factors
that most affect the lifespan of your product are usually mean
operating temperature and thermal cycling.

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HIGH-RELIABILITY PCB DESIGN TIPS FOR
AEROSPACE FOR OTHER HARSH ENVIRONMENTS

M A I N TA I N I N G
CONNECTIVITY
Electronic components must be connected to each other to function. Silicon dies are
connected to metal lead frames with bonding wires, lead frames are connected to copper
pads with solder, and copper pads are connected to each other with traces, copper pours,
and vias. To maintain a high-reliability board, all of these connections must remain intact
over the lifespan of the device.

Temperature Issues
Thermal Expansion
When the temperature of a printed circuit board or its components increases, the
inter-atomic distance increases as well -- you might remember this is called the Coefficient
of Thermal Expansion (CTE). Unfortunately, the relationship between separation distance
and temperature varies with material composition. And to make matters worse, for PCBs,
the CTE is often anisotropic -- which means the value depends on the direction.

Take FR-4, the basic building block of most boards -- it is made of a two-dimensional
weave of fiberglass strands. The weft-and-warp fibers help to minimize in-plane expansion
(x-axis, y-axis). But they do little for out-of-plane (z-axis) thermal expansion.

You should also be aware that not all weft-and-warp fibers are identical, some dielectrics
purposely use different glass fibers which will result in slight CTE variability by axis. Check
your dielectric’s slash-sheet¹ to find out more about your laminate materials.

PCB prepreg and core material is often made of a biaxial weave of fiberglass encased in
epoxy resin.

¹ Slash-sheets refer to an appendix to IPC-4101 and IPC-4103, the specification for laminate and prepreg construction properties. See
https://www.isola-group.com/products/all-printed-circuit-materials/slash-sheets/ for examples, and see IPC-4101 for a thorough listing.
http://www.ipc.org/TOC/TOC-IPC-4101E.pdf shows the table of contents for the standard.

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HIGH-RELIABILITY PCB DESIGN TIPS FOR
AEROSPACE FOR OTHER HARSH ENVIRONMENTS

Via Failures
The CTE for copper is low compared to the CTE for PCB dielectric and base materials.
When a via is formed in a circuit board, and the board is heated, differential z-axis
expansion leads to shear stress between the via wall and the dielectric layer. This force
will eventually cause a failure in either the via or the copper foil.

The via aspect-ratio, the amount

of temperature fluctuation, and
the quality of the PCB plating
process will determine whether
the via will fail on the tenth
thermal cycle or the
ten-thousandth thermal-cycle.

Vias and Pads

Vias are holes in your printed
circuit board that are
electroplated with copper. The
cheapest design option is to leave
those holes open to the air.
Unfortunately, this is the least reliable design option for several reasons. For example,
open vias can capture contaminants such as acidic flux that will slowly eat away at the
copper over time.

But one often overlooked problem associated with open vias is solder thieving. During the
reflow process, solder paste will liquify and follow exposed copper to a hole where it will
enter and fill the hole. This leaves the copper pad with an insufficient amount of solder
metal to form a proper bond between the part and the PCB.

This x-ray image shows an open

via placed too close to a BGA part.
Solder left one pad and filled the
via hole, leaving an insufficient
amount of solder on the pad.

Adding unfilled vias to a thermal

pad can cause issues as well. Not
only does the via allow solder
thieving, but it can also allow
outgassing into the space
between the part and the PCB,
forcing solder away from the
thermal pad.

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HIGH-RELIABILITY PCB DESIGN TIPS FOR
AEROSPACE FOR OTHER HARSH ENVIRONMENTS

This image of a 76-pin TQFP part

shows multiple open vias beneath
the thermal pad in this design.
Every via beneath the pad exhibits
evidence of either solder thieving
or outgassing. This part would be
acceptable as long as there is less
than 50% of air between the part
and the PCB.

The solution to this problem is to

not leave open vias beneath or
near solder pads.

For vias near pads, use your

solder-resist layer to provide a
barrier between the solder pad
and the via. Via-tenting is an
inexpensive, albeit unreliable
option, but it only works on the
smallest of vias -- a more reliable
option is to fill the vias with LPI
solder-resist.

For vias beneath pads,

the most reliable
option is to use filled
and capped vias where
a layer of copper is
electrodeposited atop
an epoxy fill material.
The second best, albeit
somewhat riskier option,
is to use small diameter
vias (<12 mil) that are
then filled during
electroplating with 1-oz
or thicker copper --
there will still be holes
or voids present that can allow outgassing, but the volume of the remaining hole should
be small enough to minimize solder thieving.

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HIGH-RELIABILITY PCB DESIGN TIPS FOR
AEROSPACE FOR OTHER HARSH ENVIRONMENTS

Solder
Before the RoHS act, the majority of components were attached to circuit boards with a
Lead/Tin eutectic solder. Eutectics are combinations of metals, that when mixed, have a
low transition temperature that allows a direct solid-to-liquid phase transition. This is
important to electronics manufacturers because high temperatures will destroy, or
severely shorten the lifespan of printed circuit boards and their components.

This diagram shows the various phases of matter based on temperature and the
percentage mixture of the metals Tin and Lead, by weight. At approximately 60% Tin and
40% Lead, the metals undergo a single phase transition from solid to liquid, without
passing through an intermediate phase of matter -- this is the Eutectic point, and it occurs
at a temperature that is lower than the melting temperature of either metal in pure form.

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HIGH-RELIABILITY PCB DESIGN TIPS FOR
AEROSPACE FOR OTHER HARSH ENVIRONMENTS

Engineers were concerned that they would never find material as ductile or wet table as
their beloved Sn-63 Pb-37 mixture, so metallurgists got to work mixing various
compositions of Aluminum, Antimony, Bismuth, Cadmium, Chromium, Copper, Gold,
Indium, Lead, Molybdenum, Nickel, Palladium, Platinum, Silver, Tin, Tungsten, and Zinc to
better understand the phase diagrams and material properties.

This periodic table shows some of the elements that were tested for their viability in solder
compounds. Test results are available at https://msed.nist.gov/solder https://www.msed.
nist.gov/solder/NIST_LeadfreeSolder_v4.pdf

After the initial engineering uproar settled, engineers found out that there were dozens of
alloys suitable to act as solders in an RoHS application. And, since these solders all had
different material properties, they could be used for different applications.

For example -- Transient Liquid Phase Sintering Paste (TLPSP) is a type of solder paste
that liquifies once. Once the inter-metallics have formed, the phase-diagram changes and
the liquid-phase disappears. Once melted, TLPSP cannot be re-melted until the
temperature is so high it will destroy both the integrated circuit and the underlying Printed
Circuit Board.² This makes the paste useful for multiple-reflow cycle and
harsh-environments.

² https://www.hitachi-chem.co.jp/english/report/060/60_tr09.pdf

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HIGH-RELIABILITY PCB DESIGN TIPS FOR
AEROSPACE FOR OTHER HARSH ENVIRONMENTS

SUMMARY Designing for reliability entails a wide

array of design choices, material
selections, and carefully controlled
manufacturing processes. Focusing on
thermal management will help improve
your board’s lifespan and reliability. But
it is just one part of the equation. You
also have to make decisions that limit
the temperature rise of your board by
either limiting heat input or increasing
heat-sinking. Be sure to look at our other
papers on incorporating heavy-copper
into your designs.

ADVANCED ASSEMBLY was founded to help engineers assemble their prototype and
low-volume PCB orders FAST and has never strayed from this focus.

Based on years of experience

within the printed circuit board
industry, Advanced Assembly
developed a proprietary system
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surface mount technology (SMT)
assembly 1-5 days. It’s our only
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time on other aspects of your
design.

Reach out to us online at www.aapcb.com, over the phone at (800) 838-5650, or via email
using [email protected]... We’re here to help.
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