Assembly and Reliability Evaluation of Vias in Surface Mounted Pads (NOT PUBLISHED)

Placing vias in the mounting pads of Surface Mount (SM) components is an assembly technology that allows better utilization of board space. A previous experiment and analysis has shown that, if the via diameter is small enough, the amount of solder lost to the via does not affect the resulting solder joint quality. A follow-up thermal cycling experiment was conducted to assess the attachment reliability of SM components with Vias-In-Pads (VIPs) for use in telecommunication products. The design of this experiment and the reliability results are presented in this paper.