# Chips Harvesting and Reusing



## hestati86 (May 24, 2017)

Dear forum members,

Anyone here has any experience with chip harvesting and recovery rather than recycling?

I know some RAM ICs are in demand, mainboard south and north bridge, but what else? Anyone has a contact or a list of what could be in demand on the market now?

Thanks!


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## Tankman (May 27, 2017)

Maybe this could be a starting point? http://www.retronix.com/sectors/electronic_material_recycler/

Never heard the term "recycler of PCC electronic waste" before, so maybe there is someone out there that knows what it means?


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## hestati86 (May 28, 2017)

Interesting... So they will remove the components, pay me for them and then I get to deal with scrap... Gotta research it more. Thanks!


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## 4metals (May 28, 2017)

> So they will remove the components, pay me for them and then I get to deal with scrap...



As far back as I can remember refiners "processing" PC boards, they were picking components off for sale as viable components and the bare boards were processed for copper and PM's. But the *they* in your quote above is *you*. YOU will remove the components, sell them as is, and process the rest as scrap

Large tables with electric screwdrivers and nut drivers hanging from above so the workers could quickly grab the necessary tool to disassemble and pull chips and separate the re-sellable from the recyclable and the refinable. I know one guy who also separated out the stainless screws and sold them. The trick was not bending the pins, if I remember right there are pullers made specifically for the purpose of pulling the chips off the sockets.


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## g_axelsson (May 28, 2017)

Most modern chip doesn't come in sockets. In this case they talk about laser re-balling the chips so it is BGA, or ball grid array chips and those are soldered.

The thing is that you won't get an unskilled worker to pull a BGA-chip from a board without damage it, the modern chips have thousands of solder points. Since they talk about not adding any extra thermal cycles the removal process must be chemical by dissolving the tin, then adding new solder balls by melting each one with a laser.

I would expect the market for old chips being quite limited, for most part the technological development is so fast that when a product reaches end of life very few products uses the same chips as that product. There are newer smaller, cheaper and more effective chips for new products at that time.
The only viable market I could see is if you have rejects or excess stock with modern chips, these could have a good resale value.

This is how the solder side of a BGA-413 capsule looked after I removed it with a heat gun. 413 small solder balls to replace until it's possible to resell it. Nothing you do without specialized equipment.



Göran


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## hestati86 (May 28, 2017)

Correct, nowadays most chips are not that easy to get off the board, no more sockets... This is why not everything will work. But for instance, RAM chips are still easy to do, and I found someone paying 5 cents per memory chip, they resell for roughly $1-5 per chip. Also, most industrial boards are easy to do.


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