The Retronix advantage: Recovering and reusing ICs from scrap or obsolete PCBs

A CEM had a large customer base of complex telecoms PCBs, and found these difficult to debug if they failed after assembly. This was mainly due to their being such a large amount of revisions, the techs found it difficult to be familiar with all of them.

Subsequently there was a lot of PCB “shotgunning” going on. This was the practice of making an educated guess at what IC was causing the issue, and changing it. This meant a huge expense in ICs, most of which were thought to be fine; it would be a solder problem causing the fault (open or short under the BGA).

So they introduced an exercise of sending the removed ICs to Retronix for IC Recovery, and putting them then back into the repair loop. For IC Recovery were also sent 3^rd time failed PCBs.

This resulted in a 61% drop in IC cost in the repair area, with no noticeable difference in test yields.

All the ICs were tested electrically by Retronix before being returned.

If you want to learn more, please contact us here

Watch the video about IC Recovery here