Obrien,

	I have not run a qualification program for BGA's.  As such, I 
am only watching from the sidelines, however, I have gleaned the 
following information off the technet and other articles in our 
library.

It is my opinion that BGAs are good for applications with temperature 
ranges of 30deg C and less, 50 deg C being the limit.  Applications 
basically are room temperature / air conditioned applications.  I think 
Compaq Computer is still the bigest user of BGA's.

Another big consideration is vibration.  Happy Holden of HP-Loveland, or 
Fort Collins CO, expressed frustrations with BGA's in (Inkjet?) printer 
applications in a posting last year.  Too much vibration caused failure 
rates to exceed HP's targeted reliability.  (I was so impressed that a 
consumer electronics firm did reliability studies, that I went out and 
bought an HP Ink Jet.)

It has been my observation that most reliability studies of BGA's 
confine their use to very beniegn environments, and report excessive 
failures in other environments.  There are many different configurations 
commonly refered to as BGA's which have different reliability levels.  
BGA package suppliers are not all the same.  Variables, Variables, 
Variables.  It seems to me that reliability studies usually bring bad 
news.  Again, these are my observations from the side lines.  Success 
stories may be suppressed as 'company sensitive' information.  Good 
luck.  I would be interested in following your progress.

Finally, there is a JPL study in progress for NASA to determine the if 
BGA's can be used for NASA-type applications.  Check this for an idea of 
how they set up their experiment:
http://arioch.gsfc.nasa.gov/eee_links/vol_01/no_03/eee1-3h.html
(I hope I typed it in correctly)

-- 

George Franck Jr
Raytheon E-Systems
Falls Church Va.
"The opinions expressed are those of the author, and are not necessarily those of the Raytheon Corporation."

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