White Paper

Evaluation of No-Clean Flux Residues Remaining after Secondary Process Operations

Foresite and IBM, Presented at Pan Pacific Microelectronics Symposium

In an ideal world, every manufactured electronic device would work the way it was supposed to all of the time. Unfortunately, every company receives customer returns for products that didn't make the cut.

If these returned parts contributed to a fail, most companies perform failure analysis on the returned parts to determine the root cause of the failure. Failure can occur for a multitude of reasons, for example: wear out, fatigue, design issues, and manufacturing flaws or defects. Some causes are harder to detect than others.

No-clean flux residues can cause intermittent or elusive, hard to find defects. This white paper investigates the effects of no-clean flux residues from secondary soldering and cleaning processes.