Detection of sealant delamination in integrated circuit package using a multivariate Gaussian model

This paper presents the development of a delamination detection framework for integrated circuit packages aiming at quantitative detection of sealant delamination between integrated heat sink and substrate, which is one of the potential failure mechanisms in integrated circuit packages. This method is expected to overcome the destructive nature of most existing techniques and maintain a relatively low cost of development. Ultrasonic guided waves are used as the interrogation method due to their sensitivity to small-size damage and capability of through-thickness penetration. The complexity of the received ultrasonic signals, caused by the geometric heterogeneity, is resolved and interpreted using a time-frequency signal processing technique. The extracted ultrasonic information, including time-of-arrival and amplitude of wave modes received from different sensing paths under multiple excitation frequencies, is used to construct the feature space for training. An unsupervised learning method, multivariate Gaussian model, is implemented as an information fusion and delamination detection tool. The multivariate Gaussian model efficiently investigates the distribution of feature space including correlations between features and flag the outliers without labeled examples. Results from the developed model are compared with two existing evaluation methods, including pullout test and a metric indicating the extent of delamination, which indicates that the developed method possesses a similar level of accuracy.