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Registered Member #33
Joined: Sat Feb 04 2006, 01:31PM
Location: Norway
Posts: 971
We solder BGAs at work. It's not too hard, it's all about getting the placement of the chip on the PCB right and using lots of flux. We have a 10k$ BGA soldering station, but all it does is preheat the board, hold the board and heat the whole chip at once. I bet this could be done manually, with a little bit of training. The problem, however, is that BGAs often require 4-layer circuit boards. or more, Since all the connection points of the chip are so close together, routing the board becomes a tedious process. I'm sure it could be done by a hobbyist (if the board was manufactured at a professional place), but it would be an elaborate process.
Registered Member #65
Joined: Thu Feb 09 2006, 06:43AM
Location:
Posts: 1155
Not to diverge from the topic too much,
Regular BGAs (not the micro flip chips) can be mounted using through-hole plated boards non-filled vias. The solder wicks from the bottom pads, binds to the ball of the taped down chip, and the other non-melted pads keep it centered while it cools.
$10.-
BGAs are a pain, but still needed for some cheap accelerometer sensors.
Registered Member #30
Joined: Fri Feb 03 2006, 10:52AM
Location: Glasgow, Scotland
Posts: 6706
Yes, they are slowwwwww! But they're small, cheap, don't use much power, and BASIC is really easy to program. That makes them very useful for some applications. If you're a mechanical engineer who just wants a simple automation job done, and don't want to get your hands dirty with assembler or C, they are ideal.
Carbon_rod and others: I heard that BGAs can be soldered with hobbyist equipment if you're very careful and very lucky! :P The classic example is reflowing the graphics chip on your XBox 360 or MacBook. I just tried that on an old laptop with an intermittent motherboard fault, and it didn't work :(
Registered Member #72
Joined: Thu Feb 09 2006, 08:29AM
Location: UK St. Albans
Posts: 1659
The Xilinx software is rather like working blindfolded.
Yes, well there is that! The Xilinx environment is wizarded and GUI'd to the point of stupidity. The phrase I used to the FAEs daily while trying to set it up was "like trying to eat spaghetti with chopsticks wearing boxing gloves". The GUIs only end up writing text files anyway, so just document what's going on and let me write the text, damn you, I know what a .ucf looks like! </rant>. Fortunately our softies like that sort of config headache, and now leave me to amuse myself with the VHDL.
Once you've sweated blood over the configuration and it's is stable, you can just write C and VHDL, and it's difficult to argue with CPU and all the glue in one $10 chip.
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Very fast bidirectional FPGA to microcontroller interface
