Grid independent study on tetrahedral and hexahedral dominant elements types in finite element analysis of integrated circuit package

The development of integrated circuit (IC) packaging is one of the important factors for the advanced production of the semiconductor industry. With the recent rise of innovative demand of the production technology, lot of issues had been raised at the manufacturing level especially at back-end production. In order to solve the problem, finite element analysis (FEA) is one of the methods that has been broadly used to evaluate the internal stress of IC package. The performance effect of tetrahedral or hexahedral dominance elements in the meshing stage may lead to the unswerving of FEA results. In such condition, the performance of the element type needs to be analyzed in order to determine which implementation leads to result with higher confident level. This study used the quasi-static simulation of FEA to determine the performance of tetrahedral and hexahedral dominance elements in FEA of IC package strength. The monitored stress was focused on the component levels of IC package, the die and the diepad. The IC package is modelled in three-dimensional case which represented as close as the actual product by simplifying certain parts. The performance evaluation had considered the effect of grid independent study for each of the element type. The maximum stress produced by using the tetrahedral element had been compared with the stress produced by the hexahedral dominance elements. Comparison of the performance showed that the value of the maximum stress produced from hexahedral dominance element was significantly higher at 16% to 40% than the solution obtained from the tetrahedral element. It is found that by using hexahedral element in the finite element analysis, a significant higher value of Von Mises stress is produced, which is more than 505 MPa in diepad. This stress value has been established by previous study within the plastic deformation range and also has good agreement with the physical examination