# Flat Packs



## 67eod (Jul 20, 2010)

Hi,
I know I may have asked this question before, butI don't know if I got an answer. Has anyone out there processed flat packs and if so what PM's did they get and what process did they use. When I break them apart I cannot see and gold. Some of the plastic chips have a silver colored metal inside but I don't know what that is.

Bob Noble


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## Anonymous (Jul 20, 2010)

you will need a magnifier to see the gold wires, there is also the possibility of gold solder to hold the chips to the ground plane.

Jim


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## southatl (May 15, 2011)

I've seen the metallic silver inside the packs too, but never figured out what it was. Anyone in the knowing have any idea?


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## Claudie (May 15, 2011)

Are you referring to the chips with the fiber back and gold corner, or the plain black IC chips?


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## southatl (Jun 5, 2011)

The fiber chips, if you smash them they have a silver looking metal in them.


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## patnor1011 (Jun 8, 2011)

Both of them are pretty much the same. Gold wire if present is encapsulated in plastic.


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## vovikk (Jun 16, 2011)

Bought a 3kg mixed lot of IC's -- 50% flatpacks (those ones with yellow golden corner? BGA-mounted) and 50% flatpacks in ordinary QFP package....

will try to put them on Ebay.


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## patnor1011 (Jun 17, 2011)

How much did you pay?

Here is what I did. (It was only test batch - small size approx 100 pieces of single chips from RAM stick) 
I crushed them to powder - it is fairly easy. I used magnet to collect all that silver coloured metallic pieces - neodymium magnet from hdd picked them up very fast. You will see with magnifier glass that they contain small particles of gold wire - it is so small that it is not really visible with naked eye.
If you have your material crushed to powder you can try to pan some and you will see gold as it will accumulate in one area of pan. It is too slow, not really worthy recovery process if you have bigger quantities. I still keep all pins and metallic parts picked up by magnet or in strainer as I want to test them for silver and Pd.

With chips crushed and metallics removed I introduced HNO3. Just about enough to cover powder in bucket and I agitated that to let acid mixed with powder. There was small bit of red fumes, acid changed colour to blue as expected. Next day I decanted acid and washed powder with water, let it settle, decanted and repeated again. Then with traces of nitric still presented in powder I just introduced some HCl and HNO3 - basically AR. Solution turned yellowish and when tested I got positive for gold (-well I saw that gold there before with magnifier so that was not surprise).
I let that powder sit in AR few hours and agitated several times - again to let AR go through powder completely.
After that I decanted AR, filtered, washed powder with water. Drop with SMB and I got small amount of powder. My aim was only to find out if AR and acids will not be too aggressive to plastics on chips and I did not see any degradation or complications during process. However I only tested chips from RAM so I cant say you will have no problem when trying to process all kind of chips.

That was experiment only and probably not suitable for larger scale batches as I can see few problems arising. There is still question like what to do with metallic silvery parts where most of that silver colour will be tin but I can see that there may be considerable amount of silver and some Pd too.


BGA flatpack - those with gold triangle in corner (also called south or north bridge) are absolutely no problem to deal with. They do not contain that much of other metals and if you be smart enough and peel off bottom part with solder you will have not that much of tin to deal with when filtering. Bottom green fibre part can be easily processed with AP. Top plastic usually black part contains wires encapsulated in plastic so just crush everything in powder, apply your own favourite leach method.
Yield? It will be so much grams of gold as much you are able to get from material. Never more, maybe less. It very much depend on your skills.


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## Harold_V (Jun 18, 2011)

patnor1011 said:


> There is still question like what to do with metallic silvery parts where most of that silver colour will be tin but I can see that there may be considerable amount of silver and some Pd too.


Assuming one processes the proceeds from the stock pot by furnace, they can be added to the stock pot, where they should remain. Anything of no value will eventually be dissolved and discarded with the solutions, leaving behind the values. If they are collected at a later date by furnace, traces of unwanted substances will be picked up in the heavy flux cover, yielding a doré with considerable value. 

Harold


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## vovikk (Jun 19, 2011)

patnor1011 said:


> How much did you pay?
> 
> Yield? It will be so much grams of gold as much you are able to get from material. Never more, maybe less. It very much depend on your skills.



Dear Sir!
Thanx for Your EXTRAinteresting reply!

I have bought 1 kilo of 'bridges" + 1.8 kilo of whole-black flatpacks for $10.

Listed 2 pounds of bridges on Ebay.
It's a pity, but refining of PMs at home in Ukraine is a criminal deed.
I must have a license. I do not have one. That's why i am supposed to resell all my finds on Ebay....

Maybe someday.... i will start refining, but selling refined PMs is a pretty risky stuff because i can not sell any NON-jewelry/dantist/bank gold/silver oficially!
I will have to deal with gangsters, buying stolen jewelry and industrial PMs....

The ghost of USSR is still flying over our ukrainian heads....


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## patnor1011 (Jun 19, 2011)

I would say that you got them at good price. I cant be more specific about yields but maybe somebody who actually processed few pounds will chip in. It is very sad to hear that you cant process stuff in ukraine mainly because there must be a lot of very valuable scrap from soviet era - they used silver and palladium in insane amounts and did not saved much when using gold in electronics components too.


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## vovikk (Jun 19, 2011)

patnor1011 said:


> It is very sad to hear that you cant process stuff in ukraine mainly because there must be a lot of very valuable scrap from soviet era - they used silver and palladium in insane amounts and did not saved much when using gold in electronics components too.



Dear Sir!

The refining business here goes on a full speed.
But it is whole an "underground" criminally-guided business.
It all started when gangs put their attention to this topic and terrorised local refiners.
With a little help of "pocket" poliece...

Now it went in a more gentle way, but crossing someone's road can easily go into a raid of feed-up militia, ready to work for gang's money...
People here are doing all the searching job, finding PM-containing scrap. But in the end, everybody brings their finds to a underground soldscrapbuying shops, operated by gangsters. Have heared a lot of stories about refiners caught and sentenced to jail, about refiners hit hardly by gangsters, but NEVER heared about lucky those who refined something and sold the gold/silver/whatever....

The funniest thing is , that there are a lot of factories in almost every city of Ukraine, used to produce military ICs with a HUGE amount of PMs....
And the output of working ICs was about 5-15%. The rest of ICs were non-working (as for my citie's IC factory).
All non-working ICs were burried in landfields , covered with tonns of soil and etc...
And now those landfields are bought out from local city government (through corrupted polititians), buy those pretty gentle gangsters in white shirts and expencive suits... ....

Hm... tired to type.....
Vladimir


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