Title of Document: QUALITY AND RELIABILITY OF ELASTOMER SOCKETS

Integrated Circuit (IC) sockets provide hundreds to thousands of electrical interconnects in enterprise servers, where quality and reliability are critical for customer applications. The evaluation of IC sockets, according to current industry practices, relies on the execution of stress loads and stress levels that are defined by standards, having no consideration to the physics of failure (PoF), target operating environment, or contact resistance behavior over time. In a similar manner, monitoring of contact resistance during system operation has no considerations to the PoF or environmental conditions. In this dissertation a physics of failure approach was developed, to model the reliability of elastomer sockets that are used in an enterprise server application. The temperature and relative humidity environment, at the IC socket contact interface, were characterized as a function of external environmental conditions and microprocessor activity. The study applied state-of-the-art health monitoring techniques to assess thermal gradients on the IC socket assembly, and to establish an operating profile that could be used for the development of a PoF model