A Comprehensive Review of Drop Impact Modeling on Portable Electronic Devices

Abstract

This article is dedicated to the review of publications on drop impact analysis performed on consumer electronic devices such as cellular phones and two-way radios in the past decade. Prior to the highlights of this review, the scope and motivation behind this work will be briefly explained. A comprehensive survey on published literatures devoted to the methodologies established to analyze the reliability of electronic products exposed to the event of drop impact is presented. The scope of the review is extended beyond product level analysis to also include drop impact study at board level. This type of review is novel and has not been published in the past. The focus will be on the different analytical and numerical modeling approaches and the current status of finite element method in predicting the drop impact performance of electronic devices. Of equal interest is the methodology adopted in past work to establish a correlation between numerical and experimental results. This article serves as a reference to all intended future work which could be an extension from the current known art of drop impact analysis on electronic devices. The time frame of this review is up to year 2010.