BGA inspection system takes a closer look

The Ersascope BGA inspection system has long been the industry standard for inspecting the underside of BGAs to check that the solder joints have been properly formed.

The Ersascope BGA inspection system has long been the industry standard for inspecting the underside of BGAs to check that the solder joints have been properly formed.

It can also look underneath CSPs, Micro-BGAs and flip chips.

It is manufactured by Ersa of Germany and represented in the UK by Blundell.

True visual inspection, as provided by the Ersascope, has many advantages over the other prominent method of BGA inspection, namely X-ray inspection.

The quality of the solder balls that form the connections of the BGA can be clearly seen by the Ersascope user at up to 300x maginification.

Soldering faults such as scaling, cracked joints, incomplete joints or excess flux residues can all be picked up easily by the Ersascope.

It will also be able to see clearly whether the critical "double drop" has taken place during reflow.

Images of faulty solder connections can be emailed to other departments or to customers and suppliers.

A new lens has been developed for the new Ersascope 2, which is an enhanced and improved version of the original Ersascope.

The lens of the viewing camera is set at a height of less than 12um from the PCB surface.

This is up to 25 times lower than other lenses, allowing the operator to see up at the device substrate connection as well as down at the PCB interconnection.

The Ersascope's x-y table allows the operator to turn the PCB to view all sides of the BGA, even on densely packed PCBs.

The software has been further improved to offer more information.

There is a library of BGA solder joint faults which can be instantly accessed and immediate comparisons made between the solder joint under inspection and the stored image of a previously recorded faulty BGA solder joint.

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