I was recently asked by an online acquaintance to review his BGA soldering process and make suggestions to improve yield.
The test board was made on OSHPark's purple batch service and featured a large 784-ball BGA footprint as well as two DDR2 footprints and some 0402 pads.
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| Test board |
The boards I actually received had a FT256 packaged device on the 784-ball footprint since he couldn't find any cheap 784-ball devices.
The analysis being performed was a "dye and pry", a destructive test of joint quality. Step 1 is to squirt a dye of some sort under the BGA and bake to remove the solvent.
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| Dying the chips |
I didn't have any red machinist's layout fluid (the normal choice in professional shops) so I made something of my own by performing a solvent extraction of a fluorescent yellow highlighter in IPA.
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| Fully dyed board |
The next step was to bake the board in an oven until all of the solvent had evpaorated. I didn't bake long enough so some of the dye was still liquid when I did the "pry" operation, making results for some of the outer balls questionable.
Once the dye has dried the next step is the "pry" operation: insert a small screwdriver under the chip and pry up around the edge until it pops off. By looking at where the dye reached, cracks in the joints can be seen.
I imaged balls of concern with a 10x objective in epi-illumination darkfield mode, then stacked the image with a brightfield image take under 385nm UV illumination for fluorescence.
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| BGA ball with large void |
No cracks were visible but several balls had fairly large voids. The one pictured above extended to the edge of the ball and covered 25.9% of the ball area, which fails the IPC 7095 class I standard (25% of ball area) for acceptable voiding at the package-ball interface. The majority of balls were within class I tolerances and most met the more stringent class II requirements as well, suggesting that while his process does have unacceptable voiding, not much improvement is necessary.
This got me curious as to how much voiding was present in my own boards. I ran the same test on an XC3S50A-4FTG256 on a dummy board using my standard process.
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| BGA ball with 6.2% voiding |
The first ball I looked at had 6.2% voiding, well within the class II requirement (12.25%) and failing class III (4% voiding).
Lacking machine-vision tools to rapidly inspect all of the balls I decided to do a manual worst-case analysis and find the ball with the most visible voids.
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| BGA ball with 22.4% voiding |
I measured the worst ball at 22.4% voiding, slightly within the class I limit. While my process is still far from ideal, class I (normally used for typical consumer electronics) is more than acceptable for hobbyist prototypes.
