Fatigue Life Prediction Method for SSD Printed Circuit Boards Based on Canary Circuit

With the progressive increases in capacity and miniaturization of solid-state drives (SSDs), demand has been growing for high-density packaging of NAND flash memories assembled on printed circuit boards (PCBs). However, high-density packaging leads to increased fatigue failure risk of the solder joints due to lowering of the reliability margin for stress.

Toshiba has developed a failure precursor detection technology based on a fatigue life prediction method under usage conditions. In this method, the lifetime of actual circuits can be predicted using disconnection detection of a canary circuit (dummy daisy-chained solder joints). The canary circuit is designed to fail earlier than actual circuits due to the same failure mechanism by the use of largescale stress simulation and accelerated reliability tests.

Large-scale stress simulation of SSD