Earl, I looked at your pictures of missing solder balls and share your grief. This looks exactly what I've been seeing occasionally on our CBGAs when removed from an assembly. BTW, someone on Technet had referenced a paper regarding the produciblility and reliability issues of ceramic BGAs in a military environment, well that was authored by yours truly. Anyway, using BGAs at my company was a hard sell, but I did it. The components we use aren't off-the-shelf devices, but are custom made. Every time there was a component failure, it was attributed to an open BGA solder joint. Many BGAs were painstakingly removed (these boards are bonded to a rather large composite restraining core) and replaced. I think I still have sort of a black eye for pushing the BGA technology. Occasionally our Test Engineers were actually able to pin-point the exact solder joint of the suspected open. Upon removal, low and behold the ball location of the open joint looked exactly like your photos. All other ball locations had remnants of solder. I wasn't able to do much to analyze for root cause, since, being an OEM, the program management didn't want to spend money to research the cause. They were happy to just replace the components. My theory? Insufficient gold plating protecting the Ni barrier layer, causing the Ni to oxidize resulting in a marginal solder ball attachment. Nothing to substantiate this, just a hunch. How are you making out? Any progress? Jim Marsico Senior Engineer Production Engineering EDO Electronics Systems Group [log in to unmask] <mailto:[log in to unmask]> 631-595-5879 -----Original Message----- From: [log in to unmask] [SMTP:[log in to unmask]] Sent: Tuesday, March 12, 2002 2:24 PM To: [log in to unmask] Subject: [TN] Earls pics are up, and a question... Hey all! The pictures of Earls missing balls are up! Go to: http://www.stevezeva.homestead.com ...and I have a question that's off topic here. What is a good fluid to use in your printer stencil cleaner? We have a DEK 288 and we use no clean paste. Thanks! -Steve Gregory- --------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Technet Mail List provided as a free service by IPC using LISTSERV 1.8d To unsubscribe, send a message to [log in to unmask] with following text in the BODY (NOT the subject field): SIGNOFF Technet To temporarily halt delivery of Technet send e-mail to [log in to unmask]: SET Technet NOMAIL To receive ONE mailing per day of all the posts: send e-mail to [log in to unmask]: SET Technet Digest Search previous postings at: www.ipc.org > On-Line Resources & Databases > E-mail Archives Please visit IPC web site http://www.ipc.org/html/forum.htm for additional information, or contact Keach Sasamori at [log in to unmask] or 847-509-9700 ext.5315 ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------