**NEW**(Improved) IC chips protocol

[samuelbaldwin010]

So, I have a confession, I screwed up, how much I have screwed up is anyone's guess. But now that I have seen the error in my ways, I am here to show what I have learned and hopefully, just maybe prevent others from making my, we'll just say amateur mistake.

I have been processing my ic chips the same way for a long time in which the brief description of steps are written below:

1) Depopulate circuit board(s); in my case, I do it mechanically. Meaning hand tools without heat usually.

2) Trim useless materials off. I.e. the soldered copper contacts/ legs.

3) Incinerate to ash, as much carbon I can get rid of the better.

4) Crush/ pulverize to as fine a powder as possible. I have a very high tech way; it involves a towing hitch with a 2-1/2 inch ball and a metal pan or bowl

5) Sieve to separate all of the metallics that won't fall through the screen.

6) Treat powder with magnet to get the remainder of metallics that fell through on previous step.

7) Rinse powder well to rid of ash and/or any remaining carbon (hopefully none).

8) Treatment of powders with nitric to rid of base metals. Several treatments if necessary until little to no reaction exists.

9) Wash/ rinse well with water until clear.

10) Treat with AR: adding HCL and then nitric (or preferred oxidizer) small increments until dissolution is achieved.

11) Add sulfuric to drop any lead, then Filter to rid solution of the remaining insolubles and silicon dies, etc.

12) Treat with sulfamic (if applicable) to use up any excess nitric.

13) Precipitate your gold with choice of precipitant.



Now the reason I am wanting to change my usual protocol is that while I was processing some circuit boards the other night through my usual means of depopulation, I just happened to break one of the chips open and I noticed that the internals had gold plating all over it, then it got me thinking about how much gold I may or may not have been throwing away.

When thinking about why I didn't notice or even consider this before, I came to the conclusion that I just never noticed it because of the incineration step kinda changes the color of not blackens the metal so it wasn't noticeable to me, also when learning about how to do the IC chips, I don't think or at least remember anyone mentioning that there would be gold plated metallics on the inside of the chips, I just specifically remember that there was thin, tiny gold bonding wire that most of the time, you could not see to begin with.

Pictures are worth a thousand words:

 

[samuelbaldwin010]

So, I have a confession, I screwed up, how much I have screwed up is anyone's guess. But now that I have seen the error in my ways, I am here to show what I have learned and hopefully, just maybe prevent others from making my, we'll just say amateur mistake.

I have been processing my ic chips the same way for a long time in which the brief description of steps are written below:

1) Depopulate circuit board(s); in my case, I do it mechanically. Meaning hand tools without heat usually.

2) Trim useless materials off. I.e. the soldered copper contacts/ legs.

3) Incinerate to ash, as much carbon I can get rid of the better.

4) Crush/ pulverize to as fine a powder as possible. I have a very high tech way; it involves a towing hitch with a 2-1/2 inch ball and a metal pan or bowl

5) Sieve to separate all of the metallics that won't fall through the screen.

6) Treat powder with magnet to get the remainder of metallics that fell through on previous step.

7) Rinse powder well to rid of ash and/or any remaining carbon (hopefully none).

8) Treatment of powders with nitric to rid of base metals. Several treatments if necessary until little to no reaction exists.

9) Wash/ rinse well with water until clear.

10) Treat with AR: adding HCL and then nitric (or preferred oxidizer) small increments until dissolution is achieved.

11) Add sulfuric to drop any lead, then Filter to rid solution of the remaining insolubles and silicon dies, etc.

12) Treat with sulfamic (if applicable) to use up any excess nitric.

13) Precipitate your gold with choice of precipitant.



Now the reason I am wanting to change my usual protocol is that while I was processing some circuit boards the other night through my usual means of depopulation, I just happened to break one of the chips open and I noticed that the internals had gold plating all over it, then it got me thinking about how much gold I may or may not have been throwing away.

When thinking about why I didn't notice or even consider this before, I came to the conclusion that I just never noticed it because of the incineration step kinda changes the color of not blackens the metal so it wasn't noticeable to me, also when learning about how to do the IC chips, I don't think or at least remember anyone mentioning that there would be gold plated metallics on the inside of the chips, I just specifically remember that there was thin, tiny gold bonding wire that most of the time, you could not see to begin with.

Pictures are worth a thousand words:

So now that I have made this important discovery I have decided that I needed to seriously reevaluate my original protocol but, I think only I need to add a step that involves breaking the chips open, which I have already started implementing.

Once I am able to identify and determine whether or not the internals have gold plating on them, I will now separate the material into 2 or 3 separate categories, dependent upon the material I am currently working on, right now they're as follows:

1) chips with no plated internals. I.e. Base metal only.

2) chips with gold plated internals and also, sometimes externals as well.

3) chips with silver plated internals and externals.

And so now I have 3 separated categories which will only be processed separately for a brief portion of my improved protocol, which will be the steps leading up to the sieving and magnetic separation steps.
After those steps, you could then add all of your powders from the chips to be further processed as a whole and then you could process the gold/silver plated components that were recovered from the chips separately from each other.

I have decided that my best course of action is to take my plated chip internals and add them to my collection of gold plated pins, connectors, other plated materials, ect.
The gold plated materials will be then processed in my case by sulfuric acid stripping cell.

 

[Alondro]

My method in the works is:

1. Pyrolize
2. Crush
3. Incinerate to red hot with plenty of air flow
4. Grind, remove magnetic metals, then grind remainder even finer. But leave copper in!
5. Smelt! (learning pointers for oxidizing the silicon dies, which can trap gold in elemental form!)
6. Use electrolysis with copper sulfate solution upon the resulting mostly-copper dore and process the slimes as if they were a very rich metal ore (roasting and so forth).

I'm weighing the option to electrolyse with copper CHLORIDE solution, though. Since tin chloride is very soluble, and silver chloride is very insoluble, it might be a better method to catch most of the silver in the slimes while removing all the tin. However, I don't know if that will also cause some gold to electrolyze. Using sulfate solution ensures no gold will go into solution, since gold sulfate does not form at all in electrolysis conditions. But, it can make tin complexes form... so I may have to modify my smelt with a process called 'sparging' I just learned about, which should also help with oxidizing the elemental silicon dies.

I'm going to have to write out this whole large protocol! It's getting too complex to depend on my aging organic CPU's failing memory.