Effect of High Level Differential Heating on Failure of Encapsulated Chips and Semiconductors

Abstract

Chip encapsulation on printed circuit boards (PCB) requires an accurate amount of encapsulation material to protect the chip in semiconductor packaging. Encapsulation materials are usually made of epoxy but sometimes other materials are used, like silicones. The study of convective flows and heat transfers in such systems of immiscible liquid layers has a great potential. In the current investigation, the failure criteria of the encapsulated chips subjected to high level of differential heating is numerically defined. The Reynolds-Averaged Navier-Stokes equations along with energy equation are solved on the basis of the control volume approach. The level set formulation is applied to smooth the discontinuous properties of the encapsulated layers and to predict the dynamics of the separation surface between the two layers. The numerical results obtained showed that most of the failure occurs in encapsulated chips and semiconductors are referred to the deformation of the separation surface especially at high level of differential heating.