# All black ic chips?



## chrishawn

Hi and thanks in advance for response.
My question is do all black ic chips have gold in them.
Or only certain types.


----------



## butcher

Black integrated circuit chips, that covers a very wide range of chips, in this case I would say no not all.
To me that sound's like asking do all rivers and streams have gold.

gold is where you find it. :lol:


----------



## chrishawn

Thanks Butcher,
Thats what i thought it would be, I have seen gold in some and none in others.
Is there a way to tell which ones have gold by looking at them, mabee by the numbers or the date on them?


----------



## Geo

its a crap shoot. your best bet is, if your going to process chips, process them all. even the chips that dont contain gold will still have silver and palladium.


----------



## chrishawn

Well thanks Geo,
Silver and palladium is not in my refining cup of tea, However i can pull them and sell them.
What do you think a pound of mixed ones is worth even on the low end.


----------



## Geo

i think Patnor is the man to talk to about IC's, but i can tell you that boardsort is paying $6.00 a pound for mixed chips.


----------



## nickvc

chrishawn said:


> Well thanks Geo,
> Silver and palladium is not in my refining cup of tea, However i can pull them and sell them.
> What do you think a pound of mixed ones is worth even on the low end.



Well in my opinion why bother hand sorting or trying to when the values can be recovered through the processing, you don't have to refine them but simply recover them and worry about refining them when you have decent volumes, it's all a bonus at some stage and if there is lots more silver than palladium then the silver cell becomes your friend to separate them giving you fine silver and the slimes containing the palladium and any other values that got through.


----------



## Phillip Barrett

I am an electronic servicer, mostly tvs and computers and i see a wide variety of chips, both in size and shape. This has helped me as far as which chips to save. I guess just save them all. So from what i have read, so far,
about the only components on the boards worth saving are the sm caps and all the ics, is that correct?


----------



## shmandi

I have crushed many black epoxy IC chips to look for gold wire under microscope. And I just have not seen any that did not have gold wires inside.
Year of production size and encapsulation type were in wide range.
I am not saying that all ICs contain gold, I just have not seen one without gold yet. And I crushed hundreds of different type.


----------



## solar_plasma

Commonly, the number of legs or contacts per weight of the IC's is correlated to gold yield/weight.

That's why the dil kinds are low-grade and black top on green epoxy bga's are high grade.

I separate the magnetic ones from non-magnetic, so I know where I have iron and cobalt in my spent solutions and where I have mostly only copper. That makes it easier to treat, recycle or reuse them. But this might be more religion than applied science.


----------

