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Learn to properly Sort, Sell, and Profit from your electronic scrap material.
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PostPosted: Tue Oct 24, 2017 3:15 pm 

Joined: Fri Jan 31, 2014 12:53 pm
Posts: 467
I think you are over thinking things a wee bit. Back when I first started going to Boardsort, I asked them how they arrived at the scrap IC chip price... Bruce told me that it was by trial and error... they sent in enough lots to figure out at what price they could make a decent return. :P

From my refining experience, the bulk of where the values are breaks down to this roughly:

1 - Brazing that holds the gold caps to the ceramic body (most of your gold is here as an alloy)
2 - the gold cap (the plating is heavy and the lid usually has bits of leftover brazing attached)
3 - gold bonding wires (very thin pure gold wire that connects the leads to the Silicon chip die)
4 - gold legs (gold plating is thinner here and used to eliminate surface to surface contact resistance)
5 - internal construction of chips (miscellaneous areas where chip manufactures used PM's for various reasons. usually a source of nominal PM recovery, but there are exceptions)

If you take these into consideration, you can see how/why the cpu payouts roughly break down. Keep in mind that the thickness of the ceramic body also has a role to play... the more ceramic, the more it lowers the $$/lb. ratio.

This is why processors like the 8086's above don't have any special value. Same thing goes for surface mounted x86 chips.

Any chips that don't have any of the above items will fall into the 'scrap ic chip' category. The PM content in these chips is mostly from the bonding wires. Since most of these kind of chips are Dual in-line packages (DIP's) and larger lead Quad packs (leads on four sides) the number leads, and thus bonding wires required, is generally rather low... which follows the low price that they payout for them.

The obvious exception is the gold-corner BGA (Ball Grid Array) chips... BUT... that is because they have so many leads... every ball on the bottom of the chip requires a bonding wire. So there can literally be many hundreds and in some cases close to a thousand leads... which is why they get a higher price.

The silicon chip die has nothing of recoverable value in itself at such small quantities... the brazing that attaches the gold bonding wire can hold some value, but that...(*cue dramatic music*)... is another story

anywho... For a while I tried to refine some of the larger quad chips and the recovery rates were terrible. The amount I was able to refine was not even close to worth the effort. All of those kind of chips go to Boardsort now.


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PostPosted: Tue Oct 24, 2017 6:35 pm 

Joined: Sat Mar 26, 2016 9:54 am
Posts: 376
Location: Mississippi
Okay everyone I heard from Chris, this is what he had too say
Telecom for that little board. It is 100% populated with chips
therefor can easily go into telecom.


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PostPosted: Tue Oct 24, 2017 7:29 pm 

Joined: Fri Jan 31, 2014 12:53 pm
Posts: 467
and now we know... and knowing is half the battle!

G.I. JOE!!!!!

***sorry, lame joke is lame***


Last edited by mls26cwru on Tue Oct 24, 2017 7:36 pm, edited 1 time in total.

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PostPosted: Tue Oct 24, 2017 7:31 pm 
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Joined: Tue Feb 03, 2015 6:57 pm
Posts: 9751
Location: Low DOS
Lisa Yates wrote:
Okay everyone I heard from Chris, this is what he had too say ...Telecom for that little board. It is 100% populated with chips
therefor can easily go into telecom.

Well there we have it. :)

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