# To grind or not to grind....



## youngleo (Mar 6, 2010)

Act three, scene one...

Is it better to grind your ceramic ICs, SPUs, CPU, etc. or is it better to not grind them? Does the work involved yield more for the effort? Does it yield less than keeping them together. What is the real deal here?

I have figured out a way to do it very easily in minutes, I am talking powder here. Cups of ceramic purple processor/gold plated stuff/silicon powder.

Well, as I promote this discussion. I understand that it has been talked about but we are divided on it. Moderators, gurus, and newbies alike. I have read tons of threads on this issue and I have to say that I am still confused.

yours truly,

The greenest newbie of them all.

youngleo


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## lazersteve (Mar 6, 2010)

Leo,

Personally I don't grind, or even break apart for that matter, my ceramic cpus. 

Mainly because I don't have a 'quick and easy' way to grind them to a fine powder. 

Secondly, because filtering the ground material is a real pain.

As for the affect grinding has on yields I would guess it all has to do with which type of cpu you are talking about. For early ceramic cpus I'm on the fence still as to how much of an increase, if any, will be realized. I'm fairly certain you won't see and increase for ceramic K-6 series cpus.

For early black MMX and Celeron, PII's and PIII's (the slotted and fiber types), I'm 100% certain grinding will increase the yield because these types have the black epoxy area in the bottom center of the cpu has a myriad of hair fine gold wires in it

For all the newer ones (FCPGA, P4, and Athlon) I'm also fairly certain grinding won't increase the yields. 

If you have a 'quick and easy' home brew method of grinding ceramic cpus, I for one would be very interested in how you are doing it. If you choose to disclose your methods to the forum, I'll gladly use it to grind several cores I have on hand of various cpu types and let everyone know what kind of yields I get.

I've ground some 486 cores in the past using a pipe crusher (too much work) and I was not able to produce gold from the cores. This did not discourage me as the pieces were fairly large (1/16 to 1/8") and I feel you must get below 150 mesh to get to the fine gold wires if they indeed exist. 







One thing I can honestly say is that I have looked at many fractured ceramic cpu cores and I have never found a single gold wire, at any magnification, protruding or embedded in the ceramic substrate. The opposite is true of the epoxy cores. I have found wires in them.






I think some people have ground cpus that had the cpu die (the shiny mosaic piece in the middle with the circuit on it) intact and gotten gold from the braze under this die, possibly mistakenly attributing the additional yield to 'invisible wire' in the ceramic substrate. For this reason I always remove the die from the ceramic housing to get at this 'hidden gold'.






Steve


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## Barren Realms 007 (Mar 6, 2010)

Steve could it be that you need a bigger pipe to hold onto, something with some weight to it that you can wrap your hands around? 8)


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## lazersteve (Mar 6, 2010)

Barren Realms 007 said:


> Steve could it be that you need a bigger pipe to hold onto, something with some weight to it that you can wrap your hands around? 8)



It's not the size of the pipe, it's the fact that it wears my arms out after only a few cycles. A bigger pipe seems like it would just wear me out quicker.

Steve


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## Barren Realms 007 (Mar 6, 2010)

lazersteve said:


> Barren Realms 007 said:
> 
> 
> > Steve could it be that you need a bigger pipe to hold onto, something with some weight to it that you can wrap your hands around? 8)
> ...



You are correct you will wear out quicker but you get more reaction from your actions with less work in the long run. Put a little lead in your pipe to help out.


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## Anonymous (Mar 6, 2010)

Steve, I have a pipe set up also, I use my air chisel to drive the smaller crusher pipe, it works pretty good.

I baught a spare round punch type chisel and welded it to the hammer pipe.
Run at 95 psi, and it crushes stuff pretty fast.

edit,
I also use a larger bore outer pipe 2 inches with a 3/4 sized pipe and cap for the hammer.
I think 3 inch would be even better, but, have not tried it yet.

Jim


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## goldsilverpro (Mar 6, 2010)

On the old ceramic cpus (depends on what you define as old - I'm thinking old side-braze), From my experience, it's only necessary to break the chip in several pieces when using AR. If you just remove the lid and leave the part whole, the AR will eventually leach the gold under the 4 sides of the chip, but it will be slow. Even with a lot of heat, it can take 6-8 hours. When you can slide the chip around, you know all of the gold braze is dissolved. If you break them up in 4 or 5 pieces, which opens the lid also (and doesn't take much effort), the chip has more edge area for the AR to penetrate and it will take much less time. In any case, with enough time, all the gold will dissolve. 

The same thing applies to some of the older large square purple CPUs with gold lids. At one place I worked, in about 2003, they leached these whole, with lids, about a half drum at a time, in about a 65% AR solution (52HCL/13HNO3/35H2O). I am thinking that they heated the solution a bit (but, I may be wrong - it may have started at room temp.) with quartz immersion heaters. It took about 2 days before you could slide the chip around. With gold braze under the chip, the key is to leach until you can freely slide the chip around. The chip is the last thing to go, after all the metal has dissolved. The gold was often dropped with SO2 but sometimes they used SMB.


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## Scott2357 (Mar 6, 2010)

For those who wish to go the crushing/grinding route, I think you'll see better results using thermal shock first. Heat the ceramic to a minimum 350-400' C and then quench in cold water. You can use a torch for singles or the BBQ grill for batches. Just make sure you have fresh cold water at regular intervals as it tends warm as you process more and more chips. Even though there is usually not any visable difference, this micro fractures the ceramic frit making it brittle, therefore easier to break. It becomes more like glued sand instead of glass so when broken it makes more crumbled pieces instead of shards. Thick packages may require higher heat or additional shocks to get the job done.


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## Palladium (Mar 6, 2010)

lazersteve said:


> It's not the size of the pipe, it's the fact that it wears my arms out after only a few cycles. A bigger pipe seems like it would just wear me out quicker.
> 
> Steve



Astroglide ! :shock: :shock:


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## goldsilverpro (Mar 6, 2010)

> For those who wish to go the crushing/grinding route, I think you'll see better results using thermal shock first. Heat the ceramic to a minimum 350-400' C and then quench in cold water. You can use a torch for singles or the BBQ grill for batches. Just make sure you have fresh cold water at regular intervals as it tends warm as you process more and more chips. Even though there is usually not any visable difference, this micro fractures the ceramic frit making it brittle, therefore easier to break. It becomes more like glued sand instead of glass so when broken it makes more crumbled pieces instead of shards. Thick packages may require higher heat or additional shocks to get the job done


.

I've mentioned this a couple of times on the forum. The primary ceramic used is powdered alumina. The alumina is held together by adding 5% glass powder (frit) to it. This greenware is formed and put through a furnace and the glass melts and holds everything together. When you heat to about 700-800F and quench in water, the glass frit fractures and weakens the ceramic.


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## Scott2357 (Mar 7, 2010)

> For those who wish to go the crushing/grinding route, I think you'll see better results using thermal shock first. Heat the ceramic to a minimum 350-400' C and then quench in cold water. You can use a torch for singles or the BBQ grill for batches. Just make sure you have fresh cold water at regular intervals as it tends warm as you process more and more chips. Even though there is usually not any visable difference, this micro fractures the ceramic frit making it brittle, therefore easier to break. It becomes more like glued sand instead of glass so when broken it makes more crumbled pieces instead of shards. Thick packages may require higher heat or additional shocks to get the job done
> 
> 
> 
> > I've mentioned this a couple of times on the forum. The primary ceramic used is powdered alumina. The alumina is held together by adding 5% glass powder (frit) to it. This greenware is formed and put through a furnace and the glass melts and holds everything together. When you heat to about 700-800F and quench in water, the glass frit fractures and weakens the ceramic.



I do see mentions of this now that I searched for it but don't remember seeing it before. It must have been posted when I wasn't keeping current with the forum. While looking through the search results, I noticed your mention of thick film resistors, etc. on ceramic substrates which I had not seen either. This is good info, I have a few little cards like that. I'll try to post pics soon.


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## lazersteve (Mar 7, 2010)

I remove the bottom lids with a MAPP torch and a good tap. Sometime the ceramic will fracture just from the heat of the torch, especially if the weather is a little cooler out. 

This could mean that if you cool the ceramic first, then heat you may get a good fracture.

I'm still not convinced the ceramic substrate holds any hidden gold aside from the side braze and the gold hidden under the core.

Steve


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## hemicuda (Mar 7, 2010)

Hello all,
I have seen a few postings here on the forum from Gustavus in regards to crushing,actually more along the lines of ball milling.
He has done a large amount of material in his mill ( all of which I am assuming had been ran through an AR bath prior to an incineration )
and he was rewarded with a decent return from the mill.
So if one does indeed have enough material to do, in my eyes, I would feel it would be worthwhile to do.

For more info on his returns search for either Gustavus or the Ball Mill in the search section.
Cheers all,and have a good day!
Keith.


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## goldsilverpro (Mar 7, 2010)

I have more experience with all gold side-braze packages than with any other type. They are pictured in the bottom photo on this link.
http://www.chelseatech.com/packages.htm

These are made in 3 ceramic layers. The middle layer contains all of the traces that connect the legs to the inside bonding fingers. These traces are made by silk-screening a moly-manganese paste and then firing it. The paste and the ceramic both contain a small amount of glass frit which melts and bonds the traces to the ceramic. The traces extend to moly-manganese pads on the sides where the legs are attached with silver solder. The inside bonding fingers are also moly-manganese. Only when the 3 layers have been bonded together by firing, is the part nickel plated and then gold plated. In the photo, 2 tie bars are still attached to the legs. Contact for plating is made to all portions of the package, inside and out, though the tie bars. These are trimmed off once the chip and gold lid are attached with various gold brazes. Also, the notch on one end of the package is ground away, which severs the connection to the lid ring. The part is then tested.

What I'm saying is that, once the lid is removed, all of the gold contained in the part is visible to the eye, except for what is under the chip. There is no gold between the ceramic layers. Complete grinding of the part is, therefore, a big waste of effort. However, the dissolving of the gold under the chip is sped up by breaking at least the portion containing the chip into several pieces. It takes very little effort to do this. Anything more is a wasted effort.

The all ceramic packages as in the 1st photo are essentially made the same way. There is simply no technical reason for gold being in between the ceramic layers.


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## goldsilverpro (Mar 7, 2010)

On several common types of all ceramic CPU packages, the most difficult part to dissolve is the gold under the chip, and, that's where a good part of the gold is located. 

Say you have a 1/4" square chip in the package. The AR can only penetrate under the chip from the edges, which total 1" in edge length. In order for all of the gold under the chip to dissolve and for the chip to be easily slid around, the acid from each edge has to penetrate to the center, a distance of 1/8". That's the same as dissolving a piece of gold 1/8" thick, only worse. To maintain it's efficiency, there has to be constant exchange of acid under the chip. Spent acid has to leave and fresh acid has to enter. Otherwise, the reaction will stop. Solution exchange rate is assisted by a higher temperature, strong aqua regia, and the gassing of the reaction itself. For whole chips, this might take 1 to 2 days.

Break the chip into 4 equal pieces. Now you have 2" edge length (twice as much) and only 1/16" distance to penetrate (half the distance). So, by breaking it into 4 pieces, you cut the time by a factor of 4, theoretically. With irregular pieces, the largest one would determine the time.

Why Oh Why would they put gold between the ceramic sections in these particular parts? Besides the added difficulties and much greater costs of using gold here, the Mo/Mn works great and it's cheap. The last time I ran drum loads of CPU packages was in about 2003. At that time, I don't think that any CPU package had any gold encased in the ceramic. I never saw one, at least, and I think I saw 99% of what was out there. If there is no gold in the ceramic, explain the logic of grinding these to powder!! It would go faster only because the chip is pulverized but this wouldn't outweigh the problems (labor, costs, time) involved. You can break up the part sufficiently with one swing of a hammer.



hemicuda said:


> I have seen a few postings here on the forum from Gustavus in regards to crushing,actually more along the lines of ball milling.
> He has done a large amount of material in his mill ( all of which I am assuming had been ran through an AR bath prior to an incineration )
> and he was rewarded with a decent return from the mill.
> So if one does indeed have enough material to do, in my eyes, I would feel it would be worthwhile to do.



I haven't yet re-read Gustavus' posts on this but will. I would ask him how he knows that he gets more gold with the ball mill than without it? On the first go round, maybe he wasn't getting the AR hot enough and maybe he stopped before he could easily slide the chips (only works when 100% of the gold under the chip has been dissolved).


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## hemicuda (Mar 7, 2010)

Hello all 
I tried to find all of the old posts from Gustavus on his Ball Mill and I was greeted with ..... so I am stumped,again just an assumption that he has deleted the old posts.

I have sent a P.M. to Noxx in regards to finding the old posts.

I do know that he found value in milling the material, reason being stated is that he was trying to sell the material to another forum member, but was declined.
So Gustavus opted to mill the material himself and refine what he had milled with good returns.

I am not going to be a dog chasing my tail in this subject......but if there is a pin on the chip and a brain in the middle of the chip there would have to be some sort of communication between brain and pin via Gold or some other type of PM.....again it might not be a HUGE amount of pm but after a while it all does add up.

Again just my 2 bits worth...lol


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## qst42know (Mar 7, 2010)

If I'm not mistaken Gustavus was grinding black epoxy chips not ceramic CPUs.

What were you grinding in your ball mill Gustavus?


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## lazersteve (Mar 7, 2010)

I'm pretty certain it was black plastic ics for the most part.

The post can be found using the Forum Search tool on my webs site via my signature line below. The built in forum search engine ignores common words which excludes most of the desired results.

Steve


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## Barren Realms 007 (Mar 8, 2010)

http://www.goldrefiningforum.com/phpBB3/viewtopic.php?f=40&t=6467


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## leavemealone (Mar 8, 2010)

Yes they were plastic and ceramic IC's.And yes he deleted all of the posts,including the pictures of the mill a couple of days ago.I have them here on my computer somewhere.Gill has been talking about leaving the forum for a while,maybe he did it this time.I will try to get him and see if he minds if I repost the pics(that is if I can find them).
Johnny
**EDIT**
I don't think he has gone anywhere since he posted a response yesterday,though he deleted those pics on the 3rd.Im sure he had his own reason for deleting all of those posts.


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## youngleo (Mar 8, 2010)

Steve,

Here is the process. I am not sure how repeatable it will be for you. It is not exactly home brew, but I think that you may be able to speed up the process that you already use with a sand/lead filled pipe or something. The trick is in the ball bearings. We used a 3 ton Denison press and made a ram and cup with some found materials around my shop. The reason that we used the Denison is because it is fast. It will cycle completely in around a second and a half. I think that the pictures explain it all. The balls make more efficient crush points and act more like a mortar and pestle. Notice that the ram is offset. We spin the cup every cycle and after about 5 or ten cycles dig around in the cup with a screwdriver as a poker. We ran it for 2 minutes and after we used a magnet to pull the metal out, the middle pictures are the result. This can be screened and reground as needed. (actually the earlier pictures with the chips and balls are staged, I forgot to take the pictures before I cycled the press so I had to improvise).

youngleo


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## lazersteve (Mar 8, 2010)

Leo,

Thanks for the photos. 

Have you tried panning the dust to see if you've got any hair fine gold wires in the dust?

Steve


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## youngleo (Mar 8, 2010)

I have not, I assumed that since gold is so soft, they would be pulverized into the dust. In fact, that is one of my concerns with this process. I was thinking that the gold may stick to the steel cup and ram. I figured that I would move on to a gold recovery straight from this step. I just have no idea what is best suited for this type of medium. Still reading through the forum on that one.


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## lazersteve (Mar 8, 2010)

HCl-Cl is cheap and works really well on finely divided gold. 

You would be well served to remove the base metals first.

Steve


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## youngleo (Mar 9, 2010)

From what I have read, it seems like the gold is vulnerable to the chemical reactions that dissolve base metals. A few strong acids will work but I am not sure here on the effectiveness-to-possible-gold-loss ratio and what to use? If I end up with gold in the base metal solution, will reducing the pH of the strong acids and precipitating the gold be effective? What about with solder and other base metals dissolved in the mix? That is not even really the worst part though. I read some fairly discouraging posts that speak of newbies ending up with 10 different slurries of god-knows-what metal oxides and poison soups. There has got to be some sort of better way? Perhaps I am just paranoid. I just really want to do it right the first time around though. This is different than fingers/AP/rinse/HCl-Cl/SMB methodology. Isn't it?

Leo


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## goldsilverpro (Mar 9, 2010)

On these particular types of side-braze parts, of which I've refined tons of, literally, it's certainly not necessary or even desirable to grind them up. I think you have complicated the job and have made getting all of the gold much more difficult by grinding. In this powder form, it is much more difficult to leach, filter, and rinse than it would be if the parts were left somewhat whole. It's very easy to get incomplete dissolving and to trap dissolved values in that powder. It is also hard to know when all of the gold has been dissolved, since you have eliminated the possibility of visual inspection. You have made a fairly simple refining job much more difficult by grinding, in my estimation. 

On those particular parts, I guarantee that there is zero gold or other PMs trapped in between the ceramic layers. If you remove the lid, you will be able to visually see 100% of the gold, with the exception of what's under the chip. Intel, and other companies that make the chips, do not make the packages. They buy the packages from a package manufacturer, such as Kyocera. Intel then brazes the chip to the pad, attaches the chip to the inside fingers with gold or aluminum bonding wires, and brazes the lid on. There is no way that any of the bonding wires will be trapped in the ceramic - that is, unless you grind up the parts.

There are 2 basic good ways to properly refine these parts and assure that 100% of the gold has been recovered.

(1) Leach in hot 50/50 nitric until all of the base metals (legs, lid, and the silver solder holding the legs on) are dissolved. Dissolve what remains in hot aqua regia (I use the 2 acids separately and don't use excess nitric) until the chip is loose and will slide around freely on the pad. At this point, 100% of the gold will be in the aqua regia. It is possible to do all this in one long day. I much prefer this method - the base metals are eliminated and there's much less aqua regia to deal with.

(2) Dissolve everything (gold and base metals) in aqua regia. Here again, make every attempt to avoid using excess nitric acid.

In both cases, if you don't use an excess of nitric in the aqua regia, the gold will drop with SMB, SO2, or sodium sulfite. If an excess was used, SO2 will still work.

Dissolving the gold under the chip is the bottleneck in both methods. This can be done faster if the part (actually, the chip) is first broken into just a few whole pieces with a hammer or a mortar and pestle.

If you want to eliminate the possibility of losing any gold, don't grind these parts. For other types of CPUs, the only ones that would require grinding are the ones that Steve mentioned, where fiber, plastic, or epoxy are part of the package.


Steve said:


> For early black MMX and Celeron, PII's and PIII's (the slotted and fiber types), I'm 100% certain grinding will increase the yield because these types have the black epoxy area in the bottom center of the cpu has a myriad of hair fine gold wires in it


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## gold4mike (Mar 9, 2010)

I'm accumulating a pretty good pile, 100 or so pieces, of packages that have a small square window in the center. Some obviously contain gold, as you can see it through the window. Most, however, look silver through the window and I was wondering if GSP or anyone else knows what (if any) PM's are contained in those packages. Looking at the page that Chris posted a link to, these would either be CERDIPS or Side Braze Packages.


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## goldsilverpro (Mar 9, 2010)

The *CERDIPS* are a metal (almost always magnetic Kovar) lead frame sandwiched between two layers of almost black ceramic. In the 80s, at least, they came in different sizes and were found on most any board you saw. The lead frame and ceramics are held together with glass. The lead frame consists of the inside bonding fingers and the protruding bent down legs. Usually, the only gold plating on the lead frame is a spot-plated area that only covers the tips of the inside fingers, so that they will accept a wire bond from the chip. The bottom layer of ceramic has a small gold coated square (or, rectangular) area in the center - where the chip will be mounted. The top layer has a large square or rectangular depression in it. Look at the photo. 

The perfect simple refining cycle. These can simply be taken apart by heating them to about 700-800F and then quenching them in water - the glass shatters. Tumble them, by themselves, in a cement mixer and they fall apart. Separate the metal with a magnet. Now you have ceramic with a small gold pad on it and Kovar with about 4 or 5 cents of gold on it. About the only way to make money on these is to do them in volume and use a cyanide/H2O2 stripper in, say, a cement mixer. Also, the stripped kovar is 29%Ni and 17%Co, so the base metal has scrap value. After stripping and rinsing the lead frames, you can rinse them with a weak NaOH/bleach solution to kill any traces of cyanide on the metal. This makes it a lot safer for the scrap dealer. Money can be made on these.

*PLASTIC DIPS* are black, very common and look very much like CerDips. Besides being plastic, the only other difference is that the gold plated pad where the chip is mounted is the center part of the lead frame instead of an area screened onto the ceramic. Sometimes, the legs will be gold-plated also. Those are the ones most worth processing, but they're getting rarer and rarer. 

Both Ceramic and, especially, Plastic DIPs can be made with other things besides gold. Some use silver plating and some use epoxy to hold the chip on. You have to split them open and see what you have.

*SIDE_BRAZE* packages are what the guy ground up. They are worth 20 to 50 times more than CERDIPs. I've covered how these are made and how to process them many times on the forum.

*EDIT:* The info I gave for *SIDE_BRAZE* packages above assumes that everything is gold plated. There are many *SIDE_BRAZE* packages that have non-gold plated lids and/or legs. These look identical to the ones that were ground up except that the lids and/or legs aren't gold plated. Also, I ran some parts for Intel that used a non-gold, nickel base braze to attach the non-gold plated lid. These things can lower the value considerably. Every one of these that I've seen with a gold lid uses gold/tin braze for the lid. If the lid isn't gold-plated, gold braze is not used.


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## gold4mike (Mar 9, 2010)

Thank you for the very thorough and very fast reply. I believe what I have are side braze packages. I'll crack a few open an see what I find inside.


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## goldsilverpro (Mar 9, 2010)

gold4mike,

If yours don't look like the ones that were ground up, with gold plating or not, you have something else.


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## g_axelsson (Jul 15, 2010)

Digging up another old thread...



goldsilverpro said:


> Why Oh Why would they put gold between the ceramic sections in these particular parts? Besides the added difficulties and much greater costs of using gold here, the Mo/Mn works great and it's cheap. The last time I ran drum loads of CPU packages was in about 2003. At that time, I don't think that any CPU package had any gold encased in the ceramic. I never saw one, at least, and I think I saw 99% of what was out there.



There are a number of reasons to have gold or silver in the ceramic capsule. In recent years the number of connectors on a chip have risen sharply and to get all those tracks into the chip you have to make narrower tracks. The Mo, Mo-Mn and W-tracks have too high resistance so copper, gold, silver and even pgm:s in different alloys have been used. At least with the advance in LTCC (Low Temperature Cofired Ceramics) it is now possible to build systems in hybrid packages with traces of gold and other precious metals.
Some areas where hybrid modules are used in is in mobile phones, high frequency radio and radar equipment and in high end computers.

Reference : http://www.ltcc-consulting.com/LTCC_technology_materials

/Göran


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## dtectr (Jul 15, 2010)

g_axelsson said:


> Digging up another old thread...
> 
> 
> 
> ...



i have taken some photos of my (extremely limited, singular) experience with ceramic & fiberglass-layered chips. I will post when all are developed after excursion to WILDERNESS" ("tweeet-tweeet" (that's birds);"brrr-ip, brrr-ip" (that's frogs); "_____" (that's no people"). there does seem to be a fair quantity of gold in the ceramic on some, but can't say which till I get photos developed.
jordan


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## lazersteve (Jul 15, 2010)

Most of the Pentium and older genre ceramic cpus are *not* going to have the precious metals traces inside the ceramic substrate. As Goran points out, this is a recent trend brought about by extreme miniaturization requirements. Back in the day this was not the case.

Steve


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## hfywc (Dec 2, 2010)

there's a way to settle this....

process the the ics or cpus first without breaking/grinding to remove every metal visible. then grind and leach with ar to see if there are still gold to be extracted.
i would love to try this but i have no access to a grinding machine.

would be nice if it can be done by types of cpu just to find out which ones contains gold.

just my thoughts.

alan


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## Bellien (Jul 20, 2011)

I noticed most of the references in the thread where to CPUs, I've seen what looked like very thin fibres of gold on the edges of several broken IC chips. I stuck one under a microscope to see what you think.

In the first picture is the bottom of the chip which was separated from its fibre base, the yellow/orange objects are coated gold foils. The wires appear to penetrate down through the ceramic to connect with these conductors. 

The middle picture is the broken chip with the wires general location indicated by the pencil lines.

The microscope shot is at 100X and taken with a blackberry - the quality suffered a lot.

The depth is lost but the wires are roughly 1/4 of the way through the ceramic, the longer of them is the only one visible to my naked eye, and only just.

As far as I can tell the top part of the chip is ceramic, and the wires are embedded in the ceramic. The chip is out of a modem.

Does this fit with general experience?


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## NoIdea (Jul 20, 2011)

Hello All - Just gunna throw in my two cents worth. Due to my lack of finance i always look outside the square, I put my CPU's in a 500ml tin can, making sure the pins and metal on the CPU's are not touching the can sides (eliminate diffusion). Placing another smaller can with a larger diameter so it can sit on top, making a lid. Then put this into our fire place to cook. Basically things tend to fall off, even the silicon waffer, which i read in another clip on here that you can get $5NZ each. After cooling, the bits that fall off are remover and the rest of the CPU gets put into an old CO2 canister (Approx. 8cm inside dia, 30cm long and 3 to 4mm thick) with it's top cut off and armed with a 4cm diameter steel rod and hammer i hammer the ba-gee-biz out of it. Makes alot of noise but it works. 

Deano


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## Macgiver (Aug 6, 2011)

A simple ball mill can be made from a Harbor Freight cement mixer found on sale for $99. Flatten out the paddles for less angle of attack, the get some used large (1 to 3 inch in size and 5 to 15 in count) ball bearings from a machine shop, create a cover for the front of HTPE or use thick plastic 6mm or better, affixed with a large heavy rubber band. Fill the mixer about 1/3 full, close the cover, turn it on and let it run for a few hours. Sift and re run any remaining larger pieces. ALWAYS wear a mask and protective goggles to avoid ingesting dust.

CW


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