The significance of interfacial delamination as a crucial failure mechanism in electronic packaging has been documented in many papers. A number of failure criteria have been used to solve the problems with a pre-crack at the interface. However, in real electronic packages, the size and location of the cracks or/and delamination cannot be predicted. It is not easy to use the traditional fracture criteria to deal with more complicated 3D delamination problems. The epoxy molding compound (EMC)/copper leadframe interface was selected in this study. A series of button shear tests were conducted to evaluate the interfacial adhesion between the EMC and copper. In each test, the failure load acting on the EMC of the button shear sample was measured at different shear angles and a finite element model was used to evaluate the stresses at the EMC/copper interface. In this paper, an energy-based failure criterion is proposed using both the interfacial distortional and hydrostatic strain energy densities as two failure parameters. Stresses were extracted from the numerical simulation in order to calculate the interfacial distortional strain energy density, U-d, and the interfacial hydrostatic strain energy density, U-h, related, respectively, to the shear and tensile modes. U-d and U-h were averaged within a selected region of the finite element model where it exhibits high interfacial strain energy density values.