Jumper Wire Nightmare
Oops! Somebody goofed. Happens all the time. Routing for a surface mount connector was off in a big way. How in the world can it be corrected?
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Exploding Solder Balls
Could such a thing occur? People solder tens of thousands of BGA components a day. Most of this activity occurs in the flow of manufacturing and some during ...
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Cutting Circuits and Conductors
Quite often, a rework department is confronted with the task of cutting, rather than establishing, connections. Often called etch cuts, such procedures involve breaking connections both ...
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Alternative to Dead Bug Rework
This is an example of a project where the solution was more reliable, less labor intensive and much more elegant that the alternative... dead bugging.
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Unique Ground Plane Transplant Repair
In the world of rework and repair there can never be a standard procedure for every emergency. Things can happen too quickly and "on-the-spot" there can be an urgent ...
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How to Use a Solder Fountain
A complicated, time-consuming procedure is transformed into a quick and easy fix. Rework departments regularly encounter large through-hole components on ...
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BGA Component Site Modification
BGA rework is a topic about which volumes have been written, and in most cases the focus has been on component removal and replacement. However, equally important is ...
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Soldering Long Gold Plated Pins
Soldering to gold has never been a flawless exercise. Concerns about the quality and quantity of gold finishes buzz around the soldering process like annoying ...
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Backplane X-ray Analysis
This is one of those things that drive people in this business mad. A very expensive and difficult board, which once on the job has to endure in a harsh environment, was manufactured successfully. All
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Base Board Burn Repair - How and Why
Cosmetic surgery is big business today, but our discussion here is not about facelifts or tummy tucks. We're concerned with the cosmetic touch ups we must often apply to circuit boards...
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Flash Memory Card Rescue
What do you do when a Flash memory SD card containing photos of President George W. Bush and your client in the White House breaks into pieces, leaving you holding ...
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Trimming Conductors In Very Tight Places
Anyone familiar with high-frequency and microwave printed circuits understands the sensitive design considerations each requires. Occasionally, you may encounter the need to reduce a circuit or conductor width when ...
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4 Techniques for Removing Solder Mask
There are several safe and reliable ways to remove solder mask from the circuit board surface. They all have advantages and disadvantages and
we'll review them in this ...
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Rework for Missing Ground Connections
This problem deals with a circuit board with a series of plated through holes that are not connected to ground. It would seem easy enough to ...
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Restoring Gold Edge Connectors
From time to time, gold edge contacts become contaminated with solder. This most often occurs during reflow of an assembly, and may be caused by solder spatter, or solder paste contamination ...
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Rework for Pad and Component Mismatch
It's a wonder pad to part size mismatch doesn't happen more often,
considering the thousands and thousands of opportunities on assemblies.
When it does happen, it's a big problem ...
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How Reliable Is Your Rework?
Can you fix a broken corner on a circuit board reliably? Do you consider re-balling ball grid array (BGA) components to be a reliable procedure? Your opinion and ...
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Solder Mask Touch-Up At BGA Sites
Solder mask is delicate and easily damaged or dislodged during
BGA rework. If it isn't repaired, the result is often more rework, or rework
upon rework ...
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Review of Hot Air Component Rework
When using hot air units, the proper nozzles must be selected, and the circuit assembly must be positioned properly...
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Solution for BGA Footprint Mismatch
You have a new board and the BGA component doesn't fit the board footprint. Is this a nightmare of a problem? It is one we see every other month or so. It seems to ...
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Multi-Pin Connector Removal and Replacement
Quickly removing and replacing a large multi-pin connector seems a
daunting task, but it really isn't. Here's how it can be done ...
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Are Your BGA Rework Operators Competent?
Can every operator handle your BGA rework equally well? In real life, in all but just a few situations, the answer is no. Why is this so? Many factors come into play, including ...
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A Solution for Broken Pin Repair
While working with an extremely expensive prototype component, a tech broke off one of the pins at the base near the component body. While this tech was very skilled, reworking this component was a challenge ...
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Conductor Repair - When Appearance Counts
Repairing a damaged circuit with a wire is commonplace, but the repair will shout out "Look at me, I've been repaired!." When you want to repair a damaged circuit but don't want ...
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Ten Rules for Jumper Wires
The procedures
for attaching jumper wires are fairly extensive. However, there are a
number of general rules that should be followed when attaching and
working with jumper wires ...
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How to Fix Press-in Fastener Damage
Press-in fasteners
provide an elegant solution to various chassis, heat sink, stiffener,
and other hardware mounting demands. The potential problem with press-in fasteners is in the nature of their mounting ...
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Changing a Conductor Path at a BGA Site
This feature describes how to rework a BGA site. The rework
involved changing the circuit paths at the BGA sites, which required not
only adding new circuits, but also severing the old circuits ...
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Tips for Rework of Large Scale BGA Components
Can you imagine being confronted by this challenge? It's a dubious honor; being designated the company BGA rework guru, but it's your ...
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Damaged Mounting Hole Repair
Extra Strength! How often do you hear it in your everyday life? Extra strength medication, extra strength glue, extra strength (fill in the blanks)! It's ...
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Tips and Tricks for Successful Rework
Although soldering, the process of joining two metals by the use of a solder alloy, is one of the oldest know joining techniques, manual or hand soldering is still a process highly dependent upon ...
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Options for Gold Contact Rework
Gold edge contacts can become worn, damaged or contaminated by solder and must be either repaired and restored, or replaced. Generally, two options are available to ...
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Adding A Via Hole
We've all heard of via in pad, blind vias, even buried vias, but have you ever experienced the "Via to nowhere" phenomena? Well, here's how it goes ...
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Edge Milling to Reduce Board Thickness
It's not unusual for circuit boards that have been fabricated with a thickness greater than .062" to require additional milling to reduce that thickness on certain ...
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BGA Conductor Path Re-design
This re-design centered around a 676 ball BGA component. A total of 23 of the balls on the BGA were not connected where they needed to be. It would have been easier if the pads
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Challenging Gold Contact Repair
In the electronics industry, gold plating is ancient technology and the problems encountered in plating are just as ancient. Unfortunately that doesn't ...
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How to Select the Right Eyelet for Plated Hole Repair
One of my favorite circuit board repair procedures is Plated Hole Repair. Even in today's high tech world there are still thousands of circuit boards being used made with through hole ...
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Big Time Damaged Conductor Repair
WOW! A batch of circuit boards were improperly and dramatically drilled in a spot they weren't supposed to be drilled in. That can be a tough error to recover from when applied to today's complex
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Options for BGA Rework
No matter how much we attempt to streamline and automate the process, BGA rework has been, and will likely always be, a mixture of art and science. The need for a predictable...
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Questions to Ask When Salvaging Components
Have you heard this one before? A manager walks into a meeting and is told that there is one million dollars worth of circuit assemblies that are scrap because of... fill in the blank ...
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Preventing BGA Component Warp During Rework
This article deals the occasional tendency of larger (and thinner) BGA components to warp during rework. The type of warping addressed here can cause bridging and shorts at
the outer corners of the device during replacement
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Isolating a Plated Hole From Ground
Once involved in rework and repair, you quickly realize that all the tools you need to get the job done are just not always available. It occurs to you that unless you're prepared to ...
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Case of the Missing SMT Pads
Everyone loves a good mystery, unless, of course, that mystery has to do with something important that's missing from your valuable circuit boards! We often discuss methods of repairing ...
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Circuit Board Modification Review
Some of the odd twists and turns occasionally needed to modify assembled circuit boards can be surprising. Modifications that at first glance might seem almost ridiculous or jury-rigged, are often ...
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X-Ray System Eye Opener
Some time ago we had the good fortune to obtain a Dage X-Ray machine. For years we had been using an older machine that has been an absolutely reliable workhorse ...
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Converting Tin/Lead BGA Pads to Gold Plated
Flexibility, the ability to change, is a valuable asset. Anyone can tell you it's easier conceived than executed. Take BGA devices for example. When engineers are developing or upgrading ...
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6 Common Mistakes of BGA Rework
Ball Grid Array rework is one of the most challenging procedures performed at assembly facilities and repair depots. Let's look at the 6 most common mistakes in BGA rework and how you can avoid them.
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Agilent Adapter Rework
This procedure provides an overview of the process for installing Agilent DDR2 DRAM BGA Probes onto circuit board assemblies ...
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X-Ray Finds Shorts in Drilled Holes
Drilling boards in the post-production environment is tricky work. Certainly if the board is populated with components and other hardware the setup alone can be time consuming...
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Scrapes and Breaks Repaired
Millions of dollars are spent each year on the care and handling of circuit assemblies. Nevertheless, inevitably - and to the frustration of everyone involved - handling damage occurs ...
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The Most Essential Tool for Repair Techs
Microscopes have become essential tools in the rework and repair department. While there have been (and still are) many applications for other types of manually-operated vision systems, such as ...
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Masking the Solution for BGA Rework
Every now and then an error will occur at the most inopportune time; in this case it was in the design phase of the printed circuit board. When circuit boards are ...
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Beyond Repair... Think Again
All too often, valuable circuit boards are scrapped due to base material damage. Actually, boards with base material damage can be reliably repaired. Now that ...
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Inner Layer Conductor Modification
In every industry there is a gap between conception and execution. It doesn't take much time in the business to learn that ideas are very important, but they are usually the easiest part of the
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Counterfeit Detection Part II
A while back we wrote an article about "Counterfeit Components", a hot button issue. Quite a few people responded with concerns about identifying counterfeits...
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Counterfeit Detection
Bogus, fake, false, forged, yes, counterfeit components. That's what I'm talkin about! Working in the electronics industry is like sailing on the broad sea. No matter how skillfully ...
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Base Board Repair and Rework
