(This was originally posted on sci.electronics.design and was intended to be cross-posted to these groups but that got missed before sending. So here it is posted to these groups but not sci.electronics.design--if you like please cross-post your reply to that newsgroup. Sorry for the inconvenience).
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Hello,
Does anyone else find themselves in the position I often find myself in: It is a royal pain to get prototype quantities populated with BGA components. If an assembly house has BGA machinery they are typically too big to care about the little guy like me who doesn't need all that many boards assembled but is willing to pay for the service for a few boards.
For the first few boards I often like to populate in blocks and do tests at each stage so if there is a problem it is much easier to isolate the problem. If you populate the whole board and then find a problem (if you can) fixing it often means removing components that you've already populated.
It would also be very expensive to populate a small run using an SMT-line and then find out that the power supply is going to blow up parts (especially a worry if you have a boost power supply).
Does anyone know of anywhere that will take a few boards and populate a few BGA's by hand? In Canada? In southern Onatrio?
If there is nothing out there, is anyone interested in this type of service. I need this service so I was considering purchasing a rework station and then making the service available for a fee to pay for the station and to provide a service to the design world. Would anyone use this?
Thanks for your input,
James.