Ball grid array

[laughs] Okay.

I- I was quite proud of the name I came up with for this episode, To BGA or Not To BGA.

Mm-hmm.

That is the question.

It was from somebody in the UK.

They said, "Hi, Melissa and Chris.

I design boards as a hobby, and sometimes I have a choice between a BGA and a QFP.

Someti- say around 144 to 208 pads or balls," and not, not [laughs] he says not an NVIDIA GPU or anything, which there's far more than 208-

And it uses a solder charge on the tail.

So it's almost like a BGA that gets stamped and formed to the tail of the connector.

And I have some customers that say, you know what? It's fine as is.

We'll use a tin lead tail, a leaded tail, or sorry, leaded solder charge, but the tail can maintain matte tin.

That's true.

Yeah.

And then what about, you had mentioned the C-ray connectors, which are kind of like a BGA style connector, which I mean, I've seen those from other vendors as similar kind of product from other vendors as well.

And they appear to be kind of popular, especially when you have like overlapping connector and then like a BGA underneath.

Soldering is one of the, uh, of the things, uh, I'm always improving.

Uh, recently, I even explored the, uh, really advanced, um, topics like BGA soldering.

So it's not easy if you don't have the, uh, specialized tools.

That's the first thing.

How many hours to extract versus the cost of buying new? Those three questions filter out most of what people hoard.

The BGA

point is brutal, because it means a lot of modern electronics are effectively sealed.

The processor inside an old Kindle is a Freescale-slash-NXPIMX chip.

It's a real Linux-capable processor.

It's also a ball-grid array, which means the connections are underneath the chip, inaccessible to a soldering iron.

You'd need a reflow station or a hot air setup, and even then the success rate on extracting a BGA chip without damaging.

It's low for a hobbyist.

The modules are getting smaller.

BGA packages with balls underneath that you can't even see.

The repair industry is moving toward module swaps, not component-level fixes.

So the average person who learns to solder a through-hole kit is learning a skill that doesn't transfer to the devices they actually own.

A modern phone isn't designed to be opened by the owner, and through-hole soldering isn't what you need for a phone repair.

That surface mount work and the components are tiny.

A through-hole kit like the Weevil doesn't teach you to reball a BGA chip.

Nobody is claiming it does.

Okay.

BGA bump inspections, a fairly large part of sorry, your business, typically what type of defects are you able to inspect?

Yes, so for BGA bump inspection, yes, PEMTRON is a key application that we support.

So the defects we look for, generally, we divide them into two major categories, the 2D appearance defects and the 3D abnormalities.

So on the 2D side, it's very straightforward.

It's mainly because in advanced packaging, the tolerance becomes much tighter.

So, identifying a bump that is too high, too low or out of position before the bonding process can help prevent more costly downstream failures.

Would you be interested to know the highest specification that we offer for this BGA inspection?