Gold inside chips (black, flatpacks - not CPU)

[mjgraham]

Good work, thanks for the information.

 

[Rodthrower18]

Has anyone used a blue bowl or other concentrator yet? Panning takes a certain amount of skill. How fine is the gold supposed to be? I ran a test batch of 200g of the black epoxy part of s/n bridge chips and the best I got was a few heavy ultra fine almost flour like "lines" of color. I've kept all of my "wash" water and keep repanning and every time I get more color back out from what's supposed to be my wash water lol. So any ideas or confirmation on the blue bowl would be great.

 

[tamlove]

Good day all. I'm new to the forum. Great posts and great thread. Ill be posting my procedures and yields soon. cheers for now.

 

[patnor1011]

You will be better served in appropriate threads. But if you want ask something about processing IC chips this thread is right place for it.
8)

 

[tamlove]

Can sum1 mabe explain the chemical way of dealing with chips? I'd like to do a batch inciniration way and another the chemical way. To compare time,effort,and yield.

 

[Geo]

Can sum1 mabe explain the chemical way of dealing with chips? I'd like to do a batch inciniration way and another the chemical way. To compare time,effort,and yield.

please drop the texting lingo. it is not permitted on the forum. do try to spell the best you can when writing in English. use spell check if you can.

to answer your question, there is not a safe way to chemically process the plastic bodies.

 

[tamlove]

Ok then. I apollogise for making spelling mistakes and using text lingo . Thankyou for the answer.
I'd still like to know though (safe or not) has anyone had sucsess with chemicals on chips? Please share your experience good or bad. I shall post my findings too when I'm done experimenting.

 

[Geo]

tamlove, out of an over abundance of caution, i seriously doubt anyone will lay out the process for you because of safety concerns. it deals with compounds and processes that can maim, cause blindness and even kill. it has been spoken of and described here on the forum as one of the more dangerous processes and the consensus is that it should not be recommended for anyone other than a trained chemist in a laboratory setting should attempt it. if you have the patience to hunt for it, im sure you will find it. my conscious will not allow me to describe it or even tell you the name of the process. any member thats been here for the last couple of years might can help you but i will not, not with this.

 

[tamlove]

Thank you for that. ill just do more research and experiment. More research than experiment.

 

[Pantherlikher]

Thank you for that. ill just do more research and experiment. More research than experiment.

The second post I've read by tamlove and all I see is an accident waiting to be mixed / made.

Stop posting and begin your journey into this endeaver and let your eyes see the world around.

PLEASE?

B.S.

... There is no such thing as an accident; but carelessness has been renamed to make it someone else's fault...

 

[Stowmaster]

Hello!
I'm newbie in processing circuits. I have collected 1 kg of chips north and south bridges with a ceramic lid, and I want to try processing. I want to consult how best to work newbie
1) to burn the top (ceramic) and lower (textolite) parts separately or together?
2) from ceramic pieces after burning, remove to the crystals, or grind crystals with burned ceramic?

 

[g_axelsson]

I don't understand your description, I have never seen any "north and south bridges with a ceramic lid".

Is this what you have? It is a flip chip BGA and doesn't contain any gold. What you see is the back side of the silicon die.


Or is this what you have? This is an epoxy filled bonded BGA and contains a lot of gold.


Here is a short description of the two technologies. One with bond wires of gold, one with solder balls. As seen even a flip chip could be covered in epoxy.
http://images.yourdictionary.com/flip-chip

[rant] And I really think we should try to call them bonded BGA packages (Ball Grid Array packages), the ones with a plastic top on a small PCB with a golden corner marker. North and south bridge chips are the glue logic that binds together the CPU with I/O and RAM in a PC and there are a lot more functions that are packaged in BGA packages. For me as an electronics engineer it is as I would start calling all carat scrap for gold rings. Not all north and south bridge chips contains gold.[/rant]

Göran

(edit spelling)

 

[Geo]

in the pictures above, off the forum, all the electronics guys i talk to refer to them as "Graphics processing unit" or "GPU" for short. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graphics_Processing_Unit

of course this also includes most "flip chips" and "quads" or flatpaks. using the "one name for everything" gets confusing.

 

[Stowmaster]

I read this top. I've been collecting these chips only. Sorry for the poor photo quality. Part of the chips I have already burned.

 

[patnor1011]

This is what is the most valuable item on motherboard. There is more gold on this IC than on all of the pins combined.

 

[g_axelsson]

Stowmaster, that is plastic top BGA:s, no cheramics.

Don't mix the tops with the small circuit boards. The gold bond wires are all inside the plastic part with the silicon die. It is easy to rip it off the board before incineration. After the incineration you would have some copper and the gold bond wires mixed in with the ash and silicon dies. Some of your BGA capsules had a copper plate as heat spreader, just pick then out while washing if you didn't remove them before incineration.
I would wash the ash away, remove the copper traces with a little bit of nitric and then go after the gold with AR or HCl/Cl.

The board part contains only trace amounts of gold... I've been told, haven't tested that myself yet but I don't see anything wrong with that statement. What is clear is that the board part contains all the tin and you don't want to mess with that, it would probably cost more in chemicals than you would get in extracted gold.

Göran

 

[Imran]

pat thanks for posting so much invaluable informations.

Thought i should post. There are gold bonding wires in transistors too. It is not much but every little bit counts 8) After all there are a lot of transistors on motherboards. The ones on boards from power supplies dont have any gold just ones on the motherboards.

 

[g_axelsson]

in the pictures above, off the forum, all the electronics guys i talk to refer to them as "Graphics processing unit" or "GPU" for short. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graphics_Processing_Unit

of course this also includes most "flip chips" and "quads" or flatpaks. using the "one name for everything" gets confusing.

Are you sure they not calling it a BGA capsule? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ball_grid_array

In the wikipedia article they mention 18 different sorts of BGA packages. Not all of them contains gold but there is no data about that on wikipedia.

Just as in chemistry we should try to use the correct terminology. It removes ambiguity and makes it easier to search for information.

As an example, which of these are GPU:s?







Would you treat them the same to get the gold out?

The answer is that all three are GPU:s but only the top two contains gold as bond wires. This is what I'm talking about, I could just as easily made three pictures of north bridge or south bridge chips.
To tie the function of a chip to the way we process them is wrong, as technology advances the packages will change and there would be a lot of confusion. We should describe the way we process scrap depending on the type of package, just as we describe carat refining depending on the alloy, not what the object were used for.

Am I making any sense or just rambling?

Göran

 

[Geo]

you make perfect sense. this is like a discussion on the forum previously about the names of components. any particular component may have several misnomers but only one true technical name. electrical engineers or techs make up their own names for components at a time before the technical name was well known and the misnomer has been passed from one tech to another. the same thing happens here. when north/south bridge chips are discussed, the BGA chips are what comes to mind even though it refers to the "flip chip" as well. as long as members and new readers are not confused about what is being discussed, they can honestly be called anything as long as everyone calls them the same thing.

 

[patnor1011]

pat thanks for posting so much invaluable informations.

Thought i should post. There are gold bonding wires in transistors too. It is not much but every little bit counts 8) After all there are a lot of transistors on motherboards. The ones on boards from power supplies dont have any gold just ones on the motherboards.

Yes, you are correct. I am collecting them and do have tad less than one kilogram. I will play with them to find out some numbers.