Experimental determination of the Young's modulus of copper and solder materials for electronic packaging

The paper presents details about the adequate experimental determination of the Young's modulus on miniaturised specimens for material used in electronic packaging. The difficulty to determine accurately the Young's modulus is caused by the requirements of representative specimens for the area of electronic packaging. In many cases, such specimens e.g. solder balls are connected with the issues of inhomogeneous stress distributions, small dimensions, or special gripping requirements, that create a number of challenges to conduct mechanical experiments. In addition, there are problems that arise from the nonlinearities in the constitutive behaviour of the material to be characterised, such as creep deformation. Therefore, any attempt to accurately determine the Young's modulus needs a case to case consideration of the specific issues for the given specimen and material.