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Engagement
  • Author Author: rsc
  • Date Created: 18 Mar 2016 4:56 PM Date Created
  • Views 620 views
  • Likes 5 likes
  • Comments 3 comments
  • qfn
  • soldering
Related
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Soldering wires to a QFN IC

rsc
rsc
18 Mar 2016

THE CHALLENGE

I received some samples of NXP NFC ics with I2C and was trying to figure out how to get one working quickly.

Silly me chose to solder wires to it. The package is a XQFN8   1.9mm x 1.9mm, no lead, 0.5mm pitch

image

image

After looking at several types of wire laying around the lab, I chose to use 30 AWG (0.255mm) Kynar wire wrapping wire.

Three wires next to each other seemed to be a perfect fit for the pads on the chip.

 

MAKING WIRE WRAP RIBBON CABLE

 

After stripping the insulation from three wires, I carefully lined up the three ends of the insulation and applied a drop of cyanoacrylate glue to the insulation

to make a tiny ribbon cable.  Then I carefully trimmed the ends at about 2mm from the insulation end. Then I tinned the wires with a tiny amount of solder.

image

 

MAKING A SOLDERING IRON TIP

 

I wrapped a length of bare wire around my soldering iron tip and sliced the edge to a knife point to make a tiny soldering tip.

 

image

SOLDERING

Under a small magnifying glass, I laid the wires on the pads and heated them with the tiny iron tip.

image

image

NOW FOR THE OTHER 5 WIRES.........

 

I had some issues with the last try, so this time I glued all the parts in place on a glass slide before trying to solder them

image

Here's the image from the microscope

image

It's not pretty, but it should be functional.

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Top Comments

  • jw0752
    jw0752 over 7 years ago +1
    Hi Scott, Thanks for sharing your technique for doing what is suppose to be impossible. This should be the definition of an Engineer. See a problem, formulate a way to over come the problem, build the…
  • michaelwylie
    michaelwylie over 7 years ago

    I've had to do this quite a few times, but I never thought about wrapping a conductor on the soldering iron tip to essentially make a smaller tip. That's pretty clever!

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  • jw0752
    jw0752 over 7 years ago

    Hi Scott,

    Thanks for sharing your technique for doing what is suppose to be impossible. This should be the definition of an Engineer. See a problem, formulate a way to over come the problem, build the tools to make it happen, and then do the impossible. By the way how did those other 5 wires go?

    John

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  • shabaz
    shabaz over 7 years ago

    The big challenge was to actually get samples from NXP : )

    You've made the rest look easy - very nice, clean job! The idea of super-gluing kynar to make

    a custom super-slim ribbon cable is very inspired.

    Still amazing to think that the distance of the outer wires (blue to the red) in your last photo is just 1mm..

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