Cognitive Dissonance and Linux

[Lennart Sorensen]

On Mon, Nov 15, 2010 at 02:55:39PM -0800, Tyler Aviss wrote:
> BGA seems to have been the case of a lot of premature death in various
> gaming consoles too. I know that a *LOT* of the 360's had GPU failures
> due to heat causing the chip to lose connection. You could have the
> chip reballed and it would work again (a temp fix was to actually
> overheat the unit intentionally near the GPU, causing a temporary
> reflow, which actually did work but fried things worse over time).

I thought the xbox issue was actually bad assembly of the die to the
package inside the chip, not the connection to the mainboard.

Plenty of things use BGA without issues these days, so there is no reason
it can't be built properly.

> I believe the PS3 had some similar issues, though not nearly as bad as the 360.
> For myself, I've wondered what the advantage of such a setup is VS the
> old "slot-and-pin" style we've come to know and love.

BGA chips take a lot less space.  A 20mmx20mm chip with pins on the
edge (quad pack I think they are often called), might have 250 pins.
a 20mmx20mm BGA chip can easily have 800 pins in the same space since
it doesn't just have pins at the edge, but under most of the chip.

The first systems using the surface mount chips with pins on the edge
also had issues and had people whining about why they didn't just stick
with throughhole chips because you knew those worked.

-- 
Len Sorensen
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