Selection of Semiconductor Packaging Materials by Combined Fuzzy AHP-Entropy and Proximity Index Value Method

The residue of no-clean flux (NCF) on the printed circuit board assembly has been one of the major reasons for corrosion reliability failure of electronic devices. The source of aggressive contamination is the carboxylic acid activator as the main cleaning agent for soldering surfaces. Selecting the suitable activator has always been one of the concerns due to its conflicting properties, for example, suberic acid has a lower boiling point that will help in minimizing the residue; however, its dissociation constant is low which will increase the aggressive residue. The selection of a suitable activator based on the conflicting criteria is a multicriteria decision-making (MCDM) problem. In this study, thirty-one carboxylic acids (mono, di, tri, and hydroxyl) were ranked based on the six different criteria, i.e., melting point, molecular weight, boiling point, acid dissociation constant (pKaa value), solubility, and number of carboxylic acids using combined fuzzy AHP-entropy and the proximity index value method. Weight of the criterion was calculated using combined fuzzy AHP-entropy; whereas, ranking of the alternative carboxylic acid was done by the proximity index value method. First, the ranking was done based on the overall carboxylic acid; consequently, the groupwise ranking was also evaluated. As a result of this study, margaric acid occupied rank 1 out of all the thirty-one carboxylic acids and monocarboxylic acids; whereas, malonic acid acquired the lowest rank. In addition, out of 9 dicarboxylic acids, sebacic acid was the most suitable alternative. In the case of tricarboxylic acids, trimesic acid was a suitable alternative. Sensitivity analysis was performed to verify the reliability and consistency of the result obtained through applied MCDM.