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Plastic encapsulated devices that are exposed to Temperature Cycling (TC) tests undergo an excessive mechanical stress due to different Coefficients of Thermal Expansion (CTE) of the various materials used in the system. Especially in the corners of the die, passivation cracks and shifted metal lines can be observed, which demonstrates an increasing mechanical stress from chip center to the corners of the die. This effect has been known for a long time. This paper presents a simple measurement technique to quantify the mechanical shear stress at the chip-Mold Compound (MC) interface by measuring the deformation of a periodical metal structure. Based on this deformation measurement, we evaluated the stress distribution within the package, and the influence of different parameters such as number of cycles and chip size. Furthermore, these experimental results were compared with FEM simulation, and showed good agreement but could not account in all cases for the total amount of observed shift. © 2006 American Institute of Physics [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]