10 Mar
2011
10 Mar
'11
7:12 p.m.
--- On Thu, 3/10/11, Eric Smith <eric at brouhaha.com> wrote:
"Side-brazed".
However, when the leads break off or fall off due to
corrosion, at least you can (relatively) easily come up with
a replacement.? When the leads break off of a DIP with
a normal lead frame, it often is right at or even inside the
point that the lead exits the package body, and is much more
difficult to replace. Through carelessness with a logic
analyzer probe I accidentally broke off a lead from an ASIC
in an old system, and there was no way to get a replacement
other than to buy another used machine. A friend surprised
me by succeeding at repairing it with conductive epoxy.
On plastic DIP package chips, you can get away with chipping away at the plastic package
itself, since the actual die is very tiny - most of the chip is simply plastic and
leadframe. You can chisel back a bit, and get some metal to solder to. I've had to do
this on Namco custom chips used on 80's arcade games, where the legs corrode and fall
off. In that case, it's crummy materials that corrode, not environmental problems.
-Ian