Tag Archives: 0.3mm BGA

Let’s Get Small, as in 0.3mm

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Not long ago, I wrote about a 0.3mm pitch wafer-scale BGA we received and were asked to place. The gist of that article was that those parts are very small and we d0n’t yet have a process that we feel will give the quality, reliability and consistency that we want to deliver. That means officially, we don’t, at the moment, support that form factor.

However, as it turned out, we went ahead and built it and the x-rays all said it looked good. Whew! We still don’t officially support it, but we’re working on it. If you have one of these things, you can always give us a call and see if it’s something our manufacturing engineers are comfortable with. If they say “sure, send it in,” it will be a non-standard, essentially, experimental, operation so our normal guarantees won’t apply. It will be “we’ll do our best.”

But that’s not the point. The point is that there are still a number of unanswered questions with 0.4mm pitch, and now we have a smaller one??!!

I’ve only seen 0.3mm pitch in two places: some data from Amkor, and the datasheet for this part.The part in questions is a Maxim MAX98304 Mono 3.2 Watt Class D amplifier. The entire package is just 1 x 1mm.

There is still a lot of difference of opinion on solder mask defined (SMD) vs. non solder mask defined (NSMD) at super small pitch like this. For BGAs 0.5mm and lager, the general consensus and IPC recommendation is NSMD. At 0.4mm, the Beabgleboard folks at Ti recommend SMD to reduce bridging. But I’ve had other folks say they get good results with NSMD. For 0.4mm, we’ve had best results with SMD. It’s more than just that though, you also need to religiously follow the manufacturer’s recommended pad sizes and such.

Shrinking BGA pitchFor this part, the datasheet shows the pad size (0.18mm), but doesn’t cover the SMD vs. NSMD question. Instead, it refers to a Maxim app note (#1891) for that bit of information.

Of course, this is where it gets sticky. That app note, as of this writing, shows 0.5mm and 0.4mm, but no 0.3mm. It does reference IPC-7351, which is a very good thing, but I don’t think IPC-7351 has 0.3mm pitch covered yet. Ugh. The 0.3mm part we placed used SMD pads.

Duane Benson
It’s not just Facebook where you can designate something: “It’s complicated.”

It (0.3mm) Finally Happened

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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.

0.3mm pitch trimFor 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

 

http://blog.screamingcircuits.com/

Speaking of Small Packages …

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T’was a a dark and stormy night when the news came through. Joe Layout had been both dreading and preparing for years. But it had always been little more than rhumors from a far off land. It was a looming threat, always dancing in the distance, but never quite real.

Until now. 1.27mm, 1.0mm, 0.8mm, 0.5mm, 0.4mm … and now … drum roll please 0.3mm pitch.

I just got an email announcing an Amkor 8 x 8mm 368 ball BGA at 0.3mm pitch. Yikes.

There’s still some controversy over the best way to make a 0.4mm pitch BGA land pattern. Some say says you need to use solder mask defined pads. Some say you still need to use the non-solder mask defined pads. Now we throw something 25% smaller into the mix. The image isn’t to exact actual scale — because I don’t know how big your monitor is — but the parts are in relative scale from 1.27 pitch to 0.3 pitch.

Duane Benson

If you can’t see it, you shouldn’t eat it

http://blog.screamingcircuits.com