Development of a design tool to assist layout/layup design to minimize warpage of a PWB during fabrication and reflow solder processes

The purpose of this study is to develop of a compact design tool that would be use to assist during layout/layup design to minimize warpage of a PWB during fabrication and reflow solder processes for electrical engineers. These results would enhance the quality and reliability of real product by minimizing PWB warpage and would reduce production cost because of minimizing repair needs on the production line. Also help in prediction of the parameters impacting warpage and assist the board designer as well as the board fabricator and assembler with minimizing warpage. The developed design guide distinguishes itself from the existing design guide in that the developed tool is not only compact but also efficient. This study has two main tasks. The first one is a thermo mechanical analysis, verification and parameterization of bare multilayer board design and their impact on board warpage in board fabrication process and through reflow solder process. The second one is design-analysis integration methodology for an effective thermo mechanical analysis of PWB. This thermo mechanical analysis includes the real model as well as the simplified model. These two stepwise tasks will be a guideline to develop a design tool. During fabrication and due to reflow solder process, this research describes how layup and layout design data is mapped into an intermediate analyzable representation which supports the information requirement of several thermo-mechanical analyses including product optimization. This research describes other issues encountered such as how to integrate product data that spans more than one tool, how to modify and add analysis data that is necessary during analysis, and how to use data stored in the analysis module from different programming environments. This analysis integration technique is necessary as a general link to design tools and commercial analysis tools in order to harmonize diverse data and add optimization/simplification and missing/modifying data.