Thermal pads on PCBs

Otherwise known as a "Thermal Relief".

Is this going to be a volume product or just a one off?

It is possible to hand solder but you need a soldering iron with a large thermal mass - a big lump of copper. The actual wattage is less important but big irons usually come with a good rating. It will probably need to be big enough that you heat and solder all the gnd pins at once.

It might be worth leaving an area near the pins without solder resist so you can place the iron on the heat sink pad, wait a few seconds and then slide it over to heat the pins.

Your PCB software is probably expecting a production environment. There, equal amount of heath is applied to each solder joint. That requires the thermal standoff as your software puts in automatically or the joints may fail.

It's not hard to solder. It's hard to keep both the chip and the board within the survivable temperature area :-) The copper area acts as a heath spreader. Both during operation, where it is desirable and during production. Where it requires quite an amount of extra heath to get a proper joint.

If this is a one-off situation, you may solve the problem quite the other way: attach a heathsink to the top of the package :-)

Just connect the pins to ground and put a heat sink on it.

What's a heathsink?

with a big enough soldering iron anything can be soldered.

I'd expect you to want 50W or more (100W?) for that sort of application..

if you only want to do it once get a cheap soldering iron from an auto parts or hardware retailer.

If you plan to do many invest in a soldering gun which will give better control over the heat output.

Bye. Jasen

For a one - off it isn't too hard, provided you have a good iron such as Metcal, and provided you don't have too many ground planes tied to those pins. If it turns out to be really difficult, then you can put the whole board in an oven set to the maximum storage temperature of the components (e.g. 100 C), to preheat it before soldering.

On the other hand it is easy to get audio amps in a proper power package so the problem would not arise. I suggest the TDA2030A or TDA2040.

Chris