Surface-mount manufacturing is widely used to assemble chip resistor packages, enabling direct mounting of electronic components onto the surface of printed circuit boards (PCBs). Increasing demand for smaller hand-held devices necessitates smaller chip resistors, in turn raising concerns about the thermal fatigue life of solder joints and the occurrence of failures.

Finite element analysis plays a crucial role in modern mechanical design. Until now, predicting solder-joint fatigue has been a challenging problem due to complex damage evolution under thousands of temperature cycles, typically requiring significant computational time.

Using technologies such as cycle jump and nonlocal damage, Mechanical APDL can expedite a fatigue analysis of solder joints in chip resistors to simulate solder-joint damage.