For most of the test vehicles and test conditions, the test time was too short to reveal enough degradation to do a study of the degradation kinetics. Therefore, the approach used already in the preceding Basic Research BRITE-EURAM project, SHORTEST, could not be used.
In SHORTEST, real life behaviour of a system was predicted, starting from the drift curves measured in an in-situ test. Within ITERELCO, the study of degradation kinetics is limited to some isolated phenomena. For heat seal connectors, only a decrease in the contact resistance is observed. From on-line measurements, the effective activation energy for this phenomenon is estimated to be 1.5eV. For flip chip on board assemblies, on-line results reveal the kinetics and temperature dependency of intermetallic compound formation. The observed activation energy is higher than expected, based on results from bulk diffusion samples, reported in an earlier Brite/Euram project (Basic research in soldering for surface mounting technology in electronics assembly). For flip chip on flex, the on-line measurements show different stages during accelerated humidity aging.
During the first hours, the resistance responds to the moisture ingress with a steep increase. Then, the resistance decreases, indicating a post-cure effect. Finally a slow resistance increase is observed, related to the long-term degradation of the interconnect.
For embedded resistors, on-line monitoring allowed to determine time factor (kinetics) and activation energy (temperature dependency) for the drift behaviour.