William Donzelli wrote: The "official" way of mounting flatpacks also required you to mill a chunk of the board away so the IC sits in the PCB, and then you have to weld (not solder) the leads to the PCB. Maybe in the 60's it made sense but with multilayer boards today getting rid of all those signal traces (as well as the ground and power planes!) just won't fly. It's possible that the long leads had somethng to do with welding them. I got the impression that flatpacks weren't about increasing density but were an over-reaction to problems with hermetic seals and bent leads. Tim.