Medical Imaging Workstation Silicon BGA Restoration
Salvaged a critical $45,000 ultrasound processing console with severe BGA solder fatigue and power-rail failure, restoring full clinical operation within 48 hours.
A flagship multi-slice diagnostic ultrasound console suffered sudden catastrophic shutdown during patient scanning. The OEM declared the proprietary motherboard dead on arrival, quoting a replacement lead-time of 21 days from overseas at an exorbitant cost ($45,000), jeopardizing urgent clinical appointments.
Using long-wave infrared thermal imaging under controlled current injection (0.8V / 2.5A), our engineering team isolated a dead short on the main 1.05V VCC_CORE power plane. Further stereo microscope inspection revealed solder ball migration and fractured micro-vias beneath the main signal processing DSP BGA chip, caused by 18-hour daily thermal cycling.
Rather than swapping the entire proprietary system board, we placed the unit on our computer-controlled dual-zone BGA rework station. The 1,152-ball DSP was desoldered, cleaned of oxidized lead-free SAC305 solder, and reballed with eutectic Sn63/Pb37 solder spheres for vastly improved thermal shock tolerance. Two shorted decoupling ceramic capacitors (0402 size) were replaced with high-temp rated Murata components.
The chip was precision-aligned under optical prism magnification and reflowed using a custom 7-stage ramp profile. High-conductivity thermal interface material was applied, followed by 24 hours of sustained stress testing at full ultrasonic beamforming rendering workloads.
The workstation returned to active clinical service with zero imaging artifacts and lower operating temperatures than factory baseline. The clinic avoided $45,000 in replacement expense and resumed patient care within two days.
