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With more consumer products moving towards environmentally friendly packaging, making solder Pb-free has become an urgent task for electronics assemblies. Solder joints are responsible for both electrical and mechanical connections. Solder joint does not have adequate ductility to ensure the repeated relative displacements due to the mismatch between expansion coefficients of the chip carrier and the circuit board. Materials behavior of solder joints involves a creep-fatigue interaction, making it a poor material for mechanical connections. The reliability of solder joints of electronics components has been found playing a more important role in service for microelectronics components and micro-electro-mechanical systems. So many researchers in the world investigated reliability of solder joints based on finite element simulation and experiments about the electronics devices, such as CR, QFP, QFN, PLCC, BGA, CSP, FCBGA and CCGA, which were reviewed systematically and extensively. Synchronously the investigation on reliability of solder joints was improved further with the high-speed development of lead-free electronic packaging, especially the constitutive equations and the fatigue life prediction equations. In this paper, the application and research status of constitutive equations and fatigue life prediction equations were reviewed, which provide theoretic guide for the reliability of lead-free solder joints. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, the effect of rare earth (RE) La on the properties of \Sn\9\Zn solder was carried out. The results indicate that RE La plays an important role not only in the wettability and the structure of the solder but also in the mechanical property of the solder joint. The results show that adding trace amount of RE La can remarkably improve the wettability and oxidation resistance of SnZn solder and can enhance the mechanical properties of solder joints. When RE La content is 0.06%, the SnZn-based solder has the best properties. In addition, it is found that \Sn\Zn\0.06\La shows a finer and more uniform microstructure than SnZn, and the sizes of Zn-rich phases are obviously reduced. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]