Back in January of 2012, I wrote about the possibility of 0.3mm pitch BGAs being used here and there. I predicted that in a year, we’d see some 0.3mm pitch BGAs showing up. I was about three months off. Almost to the day.
I delivered a session at PCB West last month and asked if anyone had used a part with that pitch yet. One hand went up. That actually surprised me. What surprised me even more was when one of them (a 0.3mm pitch BGA, not a hand) arrived on our shipping dock in a parts kit earlier this week.
For comparison, the land pattern for an 0402 passive component is about one millimeter long. This specific part is just shy of a millimeter square. Even as small as it is, this part can supply 750 mA continuous. The olden days are so very long gone.
We do many, many complex parts and PCBs. We’ve put 5,000 parts on a single PC board. We’ve built boards to be shot up in rockets and dunked way down in the ocean. Some very crazy stuff has come though our shop, but we don’t do everything. We don’t do 01005 passive components at the moment. Our machines have the technical capability, but we don’t rework them, which has to go along with the assembly capability, so we don’t support that form factor for now. The 0.3mm pitch components pretty much fall into that camp. Our machines can physically pick up and place the component, but until we’ve developed to process to assemble those parts with the quality people expect from us, we won’t be supporting them.
I expect we’ll be getting more and more requests for the form factor, so we’ll be looking at it. Keep checking back. One of these days, we’ll have the process down and reliable.
Duane Benson
It’s (Huey mm, Dewey mm, and Louie mm)/10
Pingback: Let’s Get Small, as in 0.3mm | Hot Wires