I have often see ball grid array (BGA) chips, mostly those from CPUs or GPUs, being glued around in the corners with some red glue or to the perimeter with a translucent one.
Having to manually solder BGA chips using hot air, should I glue the chips to the board before heating?
In their answers to a quite similar question about soldering small electronic parts (but not specifically BGA chips), some users mention that glue can cause additional problems when it is not applied properly: adhesive glue before soldering
Not having an assistant, such soldering process remains currently challenging for me, as I hold the hot air gun (from a rework station) in one hand and the tweezers in the other one.
Without using glue, I see at least three difficulties:
- positioning and aligning the chips precisely
- maintaining the surface of the chips parallel to thus of the PCB when bringing them to it
- remaining stable during the soldering, without false move nor trembling
So, my questions are:
- Is the use of glue recommended, given the context?
- Are there possibly alternative compounds to help keeping the chips into place during the soldering, like a kind of "butter" that would progressively melt when reaching high temperatures?
- Are there other improvements that I can make to facilitate the soldering of the BGA chips?