Design of Accelerated Degradation Test Method and Failure Analysis of Flexible Hybrid Electronic Devices

Accelerated life testing (ALT) has been a common choice to study the effects of environmental stresses on flexible hybrid electronics (FHE), a promising technology to produce flexible electronic devices. Nevertheless, accelerated degradation testing (ADT) has proven to be a more effective approach, which does not require failure occurrences, allowing shorter testing times. Since FHE devices are expected to be highly reliable, ADT provides useful information in the form of degradation data for further analysis without actual failure data. In this paper, we present the design and experimental setup of ADT for FHE considering two stress factors simultaneously. We use daisy-chain resistance as a measurable degradation characteristic to periodically monitor the degradation of FHE products under accelerated stress conditions. Two stress factors, temperature and humidity, are considered and ADT was carried out considering four combinations of temperature and humidity simultaneously. Failure analysis was performed on failed units to investigate the failure process and location of the failure. The ADT data was used to fit in the appropriate mathematical degradation model representing the failure process. The data analysis showed faster degradation paths for higher stress combinations. Finally, we present insights and further research opportunities to expand the work.