Hi James,

I've not used it much, but did find it useful for QFN, where it can take me ages to put on a part and I may need to rework it a few times, because I don't use QFNs often enough to get good at it with practice. For such a situation, it's possible to have the board heated for ages, at a lower temperature, and the part doesn't go bad. I kept a QFN chip in the solder melted state for around 15 minutes, lifting it occasionally to try to fix it's position (I know it's supposed to self-centre but that's more likely for well-designed QFN pads etc) and it still worked.. it probably would have died for that long with normal solder!

It flows a little differently compared to the usual solder paste, a slightly different consistency maybe but nothing too unusual to live with. For single qty prototypes I usually use a soldering iron and normal solder wire for most parts, so I've not tried the low-temp paste for anything other than QFN. Also it only comes in one solder-ball size. Also it takes much longer to solifidy compared to normal solder.

I think a small pot or tube of the low-temp solder is useful to keep.

Regarding ball size, I don't know about best practice, but personally I found it useful to drop a size for 0.4mm pitch parts, the larger balls were clogging up the stencil (I was using the stencil without a stencil printer).

Hi James,

I've not used it much, but did find it useful for QFN, where it can take me ages to put on a part and I may need to rework it a few times, because I don't use QFNs often enough to get good at it with practice. For such a situation, it's possible to have the board heated for ages, at a lower temperature, and the part doesn't go bad. I kept a QFN chip in the solder melted state for around 15 minutes, lifting it occasionally to try to fix it's position (I know it's supposed to self-centre but that's more likely for well-designed QFN pads etc) and it still worked.. it probably would have died for that long with normal solder!

It flows a little differently compared to the usual solder paste, a slightly different consistency maybe but nothing too unusual to live with. For single qty prototypes I usually use a soldering iron and normal solder wire for most parts, so I've not tried the low-temp paste for anything other than QFN. Also it only comes in one solder-ball size. Also it takes much longer to solifidy compared to normal solder.

I think a small pot or tube of the low-temp solder is useful to keep.

Regarding ball size, I don't know about best practice, but personally I found it useful to drop a size for 0.4mm pitch parts, the larger balls were clogging up the stencil (I was using the stencil without a stencil printer).