A Method to Identify Steady Creep Strain from Indentation Creep Using a New Reference Area of Indentation

For the design of high-density electronic packages, finite element method (FEM) analyses to evaluate strength reliabilities of solder joints should be conducted by employing the material parameters which can precisely reflect the creep properties of solder joints in actual electronic equipment. To obtain accurate results of the structural analyses of the solder joints, a method to evaluate the steady-state creep deformation in situ must be developed. The indentation creep test is an effective method to evaluate the creep properties of the solder joints in situ; however, the creep properties obtained by this method do not give the same results as those obtained by tensile creep tests using bulk specimens. In this paper, the indentation creep test at 1 N loading for 9,000 s duration was experimentally conducted to confirm that the steady-state creep deformation obtained by the indentation creep test did not coincide with that by the tensile creep tests using bulk specimens. To identify the reason, the indentation creep simulation was conducted by FEM analysis. As a result, it was found that the reference area used to obtain the creep strain from the indentation creep test should be modified. A method to obtain the new reference area is proposed from comparisons of experiments with simulations. Finally, this paper shows that the creep properties obtained by the indentation creep test using the new reference area coincided with those obtained by tensile creep tests using bulk specimens.