The board level drop test method is intended to evaluate and compare drop performance of surface mount electronic components for handheld electronic products in an accelerated test environment, where excessive flexure of a circuit board causes product failure.

The popular use of mobile electronic devices, with increased interconnections accompanying more advanced functions, and decrease in interconnection strength caused by finer connections have resulted in more demanding environments for electronic devices in terms of reliability and quality assurance. Mobile phones, laptops and other mobile devices are particularly prone to drop impact during use, which not only causes mechanical failures in the device housing but also create electrical failures in the internal PCB assemblies, where failure modes could range from trace cracking on the board, cracking of solder interconnections between the components and the board, and the component cracks. The course familiarizes the attendees with standardization of the test board and test methodology to provide a reproducible and comparable assessment of the drop test performance between surface mounted components while duplicating failure modes observed during product level test. The method is applicable to both area-array and perimeter-leaded surface mounted packages. Finite element simulation of the board level drop test will also be taught using a commercial FEA software, together with how the results could be analyzed and performance compared across different products.