Electronic components are used in the automotive, communication, aerospace and other industries. Miniaturization, higher package density and accelerated development processes have a great impact on the reliability of electronic components.

Rapid changes of ambient temperature or internal production of heat may occur during operation. This may create high thermal stresses due to the mismatch of the thermal expansion coefficients of the different materials in electronic components.

Shrinking dimensions of flip chip assemblies make inspection of bumps or solder joints always more difficult as standard non destructive control techniques reach their resolution limits.

Electronic speckle pattern interferometry (ESPI) as a non-contact, full-field and 3-dimensional measuring method copes well with the challenge of deformation measurements on microsystems and electronic components with a sub-micron resolution.