Effects of test conditions on shear strength of surface mount solder joints

In electronic industry shear test is a commonly used method to classify the mechanical properties and reliability of solder joints. The aim of this paper is to investigate how the shear test conditions (shear rate, shear height) affect the measured shear strength values. To study this, a series of experiments have been conducted on 0603 sized chip resistors. The experiments showed that increasing the shear rate results in slightly higher measured shear strength in the 60.600 μm/s range. The higher the shear height the lower the measured shear force was, thus it is advisable to perform the shear tests with the lowest reproducible shear height. In case of the tested components the fracture always formed between the ceramic body of the resistor and its metallization.