Here is a manufacturing process issue that turned out provide an interesting insight into how hot, liquid solder can react if it gets out of control. Initial testing with analog signature analysis shows a resistive difference on only one pin of a transistor (top image; top row of signatures, far right signature; green is good, […]
Month: December 2014
Anatomy of a Transistor Failure
We recently purchased a new video microscope and were looking for something interesting to inspect. Digging through our box of bad electronic parts produced a bad power transistor. Utilizing a set of sharp cutters, we performed surgery on this poor TO3 package device. Before showing the images from the inside of the actual device, here are the […]
Finding Bad Electrolytic Capacitors
As many of you may already know, electrolytic capacitors are one of the more common failures on electronic circuit boards. They have a hard life filtering all of the AC noise out of the DC voltage lines on the PCB. Over time they degrade and eventually the equivalent series resistance or ESR becomes too high […]