ball-hours

Den mandag den 13. oktober 2014 23.54.22 UTC+2 skrev John Larkin:

There's been a few cases of motherboards, graphic cards and cellphones with problems related to bad soldering of BGAs

But it is probably better than anything else

-Lasse

It greatly depends on the kind of use your equipment sees. If it's largely rack-mounted and shipped like the princess on the pea BGA should be good. But with stuff that is exposed to constant thermo-cycling, vibration or hard shocks it is a very different matter. I have seen in-house studies comparing BGA with QFP and other "older style" packages and BGA did not fare too well. I always prefer gull-winged SMT packages because their connections have some mechanical compliance while BGA has literally none.

Do you underfill? Do you use leaded solder?

Some day I'll at least have to learn proper C. So far I've always handed off any coding to external programmers or in-house programmers at clients.

Congrats, your balls are six sigma. Is anything else? ;-)

(Most "service" sorts of businesses are in the 2-3 sigma range. If you have unsuccessful or poorly specified or returned projects on that level, that would be very normal.)

The interesting thing will be to run your little program in another 10 years now that you have your ovens.

Tim

-- Seven Transistor Labs Electrical Engineering Consultation Website:

If you are considering using software to control hardware I highly recommend Forth. There are a couple of commercial packages and several open source packages which are nearly as good. Very efficient and interactive. There are even Forth compilers which can live on a target MCU and you don't need something of the complexity of a raspberryPi. Mecrisp and many other Forths run on the MSP430.

I use a program under Win32Forth to run my test fixture.

I outsource C programming, and Python programming, and VHDL programming, to the kids down the hall. Drawing schematics and defining algorithms is more fun.

Assuming that Windows 53 will still run the .exe file!

What you mean is you don't know how to program in anything other than Basic, no?

Personally I only have about 912 thousand ball-hours.

Out of curiosity I checked and we have about 60 million product hours in the field without a single return. But we have no ball hours. All of our hours are lead hours. There are a few no lead resistor packs as well.

You're an FPGA guy and you don't have any BGA packages out there?

Thinking about this, 4 billion ball-hours would be a lot more exciting if your company made dancing robots.

I have to go by what talent pool is available and regarding Forth that looks pretty parched. Tomorrow I am going to meet with a new SW contractor. For the upcoming project I need someone local because later we'll have to work together a lot in the lab. Plus if I use my mountain bike I can get there without a car and partially without roads :-)

What you usually find locally is C and sometimes assembler. Occasionally people know Basic but then that's about it.

It's similar with hardware. Being able to secure local talent is a major factor driving 8051 family designs. Unfortunately I can't do that with the new project because I need a ton more horsepower but first I am going to see what the SW guy is familiar with.

Is there still a reason to design with 8051s? ARMs can be had for 50 cents or something like that.

I would expect that any embedded guy worth his salt would be able to pick up on any processor and run with it.

I can't count the number of different processors that I've worked with over the years. I happen to be fairly exclusive about designing in ARMs at the moment, but that's because (a) the tools are free, and (b) ARM processors span almost the entire range of what's needed, except for the very cheap low end. About the only thing you can't get is an ARM is a SOT-23 with six pins.

I'd say the same for most languages

if size is what matters you can get on in a 2x2mm bga

-Lasse

Any more, the choice of processors is often based on the included peripherals. Arm is a big winner here but it's also a reason to use

Sure, and the next project will get an ARM becasue I need 32-bit performance, HW multiplier and all that.

However, when it comes to more mundane jobs the 8051 usually wins because you can find 8051 programmers just about anywhere. Probably even all the way out there at Fort Zinderneuf. With ARM it should be no problem in your area or other big city regions but out here it's a different story. The SW engineer I am meeting tomorrow has never used ARM before so we'll see if we both feel comfortable taking the plunge.

Most uC programmers aren't really embedded guys. But that's where a cooperation between HW and SW engineer helps.

Well, it'll be the first time with an ARM for me. But I've taken way more serious plunges into cold water in the past. So not scared at all.

Exciting? Not to me. If I ever made robots, they would be girl robots.