So I decided to try my hand at BGA reflow; this is something I’ve wanted to do for awhile, and recently I read about some people having success with it so I decided to give it a shot.  I’m trying to start moving up the high-speed ladder to things like larger FPGAs, DRAM, or flash chips, which are largely coming in BGA parts (especially FPGAs: except for the smallest ones, they *only* come in BGA packages).  I’ve generally been happy with the reflow results I’ve been getting so I felt confident and tried some BGAs.  It didn’t work out very well.

First of all, the test:

This is a simple Xilinx CPLD on the left, along with a simple board that just has the BGA footprint along with a JTAG header.  The CPLD costs $1.60 on Digikey, and the boards were incredibly cheap due to their small size, so the entire setup is cheap enough to be disposable (good thing).  This CPLD uses 0.5-mm pitch balls, which is really really small; it’s so small that I can only route it because they only use two of the rows.  It also means that getting this to work properly is probably in some ways much more difficult than a larger-pitch BGA, which is good since in the future when I use those, they’ll have many more balls that need to be soldered reliably.

Test 1

The first test I did was, in hindsight, probably the one that worked out the best.  What I did was applied some flux to the board using a flux pen, carefully placed the BGA, and reflowed it.  An unexpected complication to this process was that since the only thing being reflowed was a BGA, I had no visual indication of how the reflow was going!  This is important to me because I don’t have a reflow controller for my toaster oven, so I just control it manually (which works better than you might think).  I did my best to guess how it was going, and at the end the chip was pretty well-attached to the board, but I felt pretty in inconfident in it.

I hooked up my JTAG programmer, and had it spew out a stream of commands that should get echoed back: what I got back was a constant 1.8V signal (ie Vcc).  I was disappointed with this result, since I really had no idea how to test this board.  In retrospect, that constant signal was quite a bit better than I thought: it means that at least three of the pins (1.V, TDO, and presumably GND) were connected.

I was still feeling pretty bad about the soldering reflow, so I decided to try putting it back in the oven for a second go.  Turns out that that’s a pretty bad idea:

So I moved on to test #2

Test 2

I used the same exact process for the second test as I did for the first, though this time I put some “indicator solder” on a separate board just to get a visual gauge for the temperature.  This test ended up being pretty quick, though, since I was too hasty in aligning the BGA (or maybe I knocked it out of place when transferring it to the oven), and it came out clearly-misaligned.  I put it through the tester anyway, for good measure, but then moved on to the next test.

Test 3

For the third test, I used tacky gel flux, instead of liquid flux from a flux pen, to see if that would help.  Unfortunately, I think the problem was that I added way too much flux, and there was so much residue that the solder balls did not make good contact with their pads.  In fact, as I was soldering on the test pins, the CPLD came off entirely.

At this point, I was out of CPLDs to test on — you only get one shot at reflowing them, unless you’re willing to re-ball them (which is probably much more expensive than just buying new ones anyway).  I ordered a bunch more, so I’ll take another crack at it soon.  The things I’m going to try are:

• Using liquid flux again but with a solder indicator and not messing up the alignment
• Using gel flux again but with less of it
• Using a stencil with solder paste, instead of just flux