Friday The 13th

I'm always writing about stuff that goes wrong (and, hopefully doing a decent job of describing how to avoid such problems). But here it is, Friday the 13th - the traditional bad day of bad days. Break a mirror and watch a black cat cross your path while walking under a ladder.

Or not.

Here's a QFP part we soldered on. The land-pattern was right. The size and spacing was good. The pad size was good. The fillets all look good. The solder-mask registration is good. No problems. It's an IPC, class II job and everything meets IPC class II. Cool.

No vias in these BGA pads. No open vias without mask near the pads. Decent registration on the soldermask. Nice, planar surface on the pads. Even the vias between the pads are plated over and masked off.

The via caps do look kind of funky, being bigger then the BGA land pads, but that's okay. It's just a nice decent silver finish PCB. And, no tarnish or surface contamination to be seen anywhere.

Duane Benson
Hmmm. Interesting.