Material fatigue testing

Material Fatigue Testing Overview:

• Applying cyclic loading to measure material fatigue

• Testing material interfaces over time

• Pass push or pull test

• Testing materials for elastic failure

• Evaluate material and process variables

Material fatigue testing provides quantitative data to compare the electrical resistance of different materials and their respective lifetimes. This test can be used to evaluate these materials and related process variables where fatigue failure is a factor in component reliability.

Fatigue testing can be performed using a variety of testing methods by using a push or pull motion. The test setup parameters will then vary depending on the method used, for example:

"pull"

Enables the test to cycle between minimum and maximum tensile loads. Probably the biggest application of PULL mode is pad pitting. Cyclic loading can be used to propagate small potential cracks until the pad fails during testing or after application of a small static load. A wide range of test parameters, including minimum and maximum loads, hold times for each parameter, and slopes of increase and decrease, provides a wide range of capabilities to evaluate the fatigue life properties of virtually any material.

"Connector"

Used for repeated insertion and retraction of connectors to evaluate material coatings, which may lead to corrosion of the connector base metal. Cyclic loading of connectors not only provides useful information about service life, but is also a means of testing design variations such as pin shape, spring force, and coating. Bending, torsion and fatigue testing of individual pins provide data on life and stiffness.

"Push"

Can be used to test the adhesion of different interconnect materials, such as solder, where thermal fatigue is often a major factor in PCB reliability.