2 Jun
2007
2 Jun
'07
3:15 p.m.
From: "William Donzelli" <wdonzelli at
gmail.com>
Hi Will
I'm not saying there isn't gold, just how much gold. As I stated,
typical plating is only 15 to 30 mils. For IC's I'd doubt they uses
30 mil. As for the leads, I once held a spool of gold bonding wire
that had 1000 feet of wire on it. I'd suspect that the spool
was heavier than the wire. The wire is quite small as well.
Some IC's used gold wire and some used aluminum. Boards
like the older HP boards had gold plated the traces but I wouldn't get
real excited about 100 lbs of these boards. They'd be worth
removing the gold but I doubt I'd come out with an oz of gold.
100 lbs of just plain boards would be even less.
Dwight
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I'm under-informed, but I'd guess that the
largest amount is within
IC chips themselves, with the bond-out wires and other surfaces inside
that were plated. Nextmost would be card edges and headers.
There is indeed often a large amount of gold on the leadframes and
bond out wires. Even on many worthless looking plastic DIPs.
About two years ago I had some scrap EMC memory boards for some sort
of system, loaded with Oki 256K DRAMs. Plastic, boring looking DRAMs.
If I flexed the board enough, the tops of the plastic DIP split and
popped off the leadframes. Goooold.........