# Chips from a 80's video codec machine



## powerbuy (Feb 10, 2010)

I found a few interesting old 80's video codec machines and opened up one of the damaged ones. It was full of boards with chips on them.... here is a photo of some of those chips. Any PM's in this stuff? I have quite a few machines and they appear to be fairly worthless as far as current value as a whole... the boards inside them are full of both these chips and gold plated Texas Instrument CPUs.


----------



## glorycloud (Feb 11, 2010)

The square chips are referred to as flat packs and they do have
values inside of them. Try james122964 from this forum. I sent
eight pounds of them off to him to process for me. He may want to 
buy them from you or process them for you for a fee. He has been
working on a way to efficiently seperate the good from the bad
in them without having to soak all the black ceramic it is packaged in. 

Good luck!


----------



## lazersteve (Feb 11, 2010)

Run one through a heavy duty paper shredder and you may be surprised at what you see. Those thick flat packs usually contain hybrid circuits laced with gold.

Steve


----------



## Anonymous (Feb 11, 2010)

They, have gold bonding wires and gold alloy braze holding the chips to the ground plane, the ground plane and tips of the traces are plated witha white metal, seems to be silver.

I can process them down to 5 percent of bulk weight without acid and only 2 percent of the base metal weight. I will be going live with a service/buy plan something this spring, as I have to build a location with heat to house my processing equipment.

I built the machines myself, and I am currently building a electrostatic unit so that I can recover the copper traces more effeciently.

Jim


----------



## leavemealone (Feb 11, 2010)

If you built an electrostatic machine(that works properly),I would grind everything in a ball mill ( http://goldrefiningforum.com/phpBB3/viewtopic.php?f=40&t=6467&start=0&hilit=ball+mill ) and seperate.Some of the plastic polymers used in those flat packs are capable of expanding and absorbing AR and auric chloride.So obviously the less the better.The only way to guarantee that would not happen,would be to lower your trash content as much as you can and melt everything together,which will seperate the metels from the plastics.Hammer or roll your material as thin as you can get it,to make the surface-to-mass ratio as high as you can,then finish processing with AR,or AP.However AP will be extremely time consuming compared to AR.
Johnny


----------



## powerbuy (Feb 11, 2010)

Thank you everyone! I actually have a heavy duty paper shredder that I can try. I'm also gathering ideas for a mid-sized ball mill from some of the other posts on this forum. Nice to know that thee have some values, as I have quite a few of them.


----------



## Anonymous (Feb 11, 2010)

leavemealone said:


> If you built an electrostatic machine(that works properly),I would grind everything in a ball mill ( http://goldrefiningforum.com/phpBB3/viewtopic.php?f=40&t=6467&start=0&hilit=ball+mill ) and seperate.Some of the plastic polymers used in those flat packs are capable of expanding and absorbing AR and auric chloride.So obviously the less the better.The only way to guarantee that would not happen,would be to lower your trash content as much as you can and melt everything together,which will seperate the metels from the plastics.Hammer or roll your material as thin as you can get it,to make the surface-to-mass ratio as high as you can,then finish processing with AR,or AP.However AP will be extremely time consuming compared to AR.
> Johnny



Hi Johnny
I have reduced 7 lb of chips to a few grams of gold wires and metal flakes of silver/gold/copper alloy.

I do not want to ball mill everying, the gold wires are in the central top portion of the chip above the silicon wafer and extend slighty off to the side were they attach to the traces, and the braze is on the back of the wafer, these are the only areas I have to process. My machine/process target these areas and have very little non-content material included.

The electrostatic machine will be to seperate the traces and ground plane from the rest of the plastic. I have a design but have not gotten a high voltage supply yet.

I also want the electrostatic for seperating copper and other metals from ground PCB's. Goal is to be able to seperate and sell all the metals, copper, kovar, and the solder.

Ball milling makes a lot more work and takes a lot of effort and chemicals to seperate the precious metals/regular metals/and plastics. Plus it will be hard to sell the copper from the chips.

Jim


----------



## keyman (Feb 16, 2010)

Based on the date codes of the chips, the boards are from the mid to late 90's, not 80's.

These square chips are actually PLCC packages, and are not properly called "flat packs". These are thicker (more plastic) than most "flat packs". On these PLCC packages the pins curl under the package; from the side the pins look like a J. PLCC's, along with the DIP packages also pictured, can be in sockets on the board. Based on the condition of the pins, I assume you removed them from sockets.

The Xilinx and AT&T chips are very unlikely to be hybrids. While I am not familiar, off the top of my head, with these exact LSI chips, I would have guessed that they were not hybrids, but they might be.

Dave


----------



## jaun (Jun 5, 2010)

You’ll get about 1g gold per kg of these flat-packs, that’s what I got.
Very labour intensive.


----------

