The purpose of this paper is to establish a law on the durability of thick aluminium wire bonds in low cycle fatigue for different geometries and wire diameters under a purely mechanical load.
Bond wires with different geometries were tested with various loads and a mechanical test bench, and their endurance was determined. The same load situation was modelled with finite element analysis and then compared against the experimental results.
A correlation was found between the plastic strain per cycle and the determined lifespan. Therefore, the lifespan can be calculated by mechanical‐plastic simulation for various loop geometries and loading cases.
The loop height strongly influences the durability of the wire bond, whereas other parameters, such as the loop angle, have a weaker influence on the bond heel lifetime.
The mechanical simulation is able to replace the time‐consuming lifetime experiments.
