@CursedFootprint@NanoRaptor I heard you like fucked up IC footprints that look like shitposts, so here’s today’s challenger: the SCM1110MF, another 3-phase high voltage IGBT module.
@danielaKay@jpm@CursedFootprint@NanoRaptor The footprint of those pins is cursed. ICs usually don't feature three different sizes of pins in such a wild order, makes it really hard to work with outside of a custom-made PCB.
@Natanox@danielaKay@CursedFootprint@NanoRaptor to be fair, I’d want to prototype using a custom PCB when dealing with 600 volts. Don’t think a breadboard or protoboard would like that much voltage…
@danielaKay Usually, IC packages have pins at regular intervals and are mirror or rotation symmetric. Most ICs come in one of a handful of industry-standard packages, which is nice because you only have to layout the PCB patterns for these packages once, and can re-use them many times. Most electronics CAD software comes with a large library of those standdard layouts.
@danielaKay In contrast, for this IC, the engineer has to do a custom layout from scratch. With irregular sizes and spacing, that is error-prone. Catching these errors by comparing against the datasheet is hard. When the engineer does the PCB design, they probably don't have the physical chip yet. Making a mistake in a PCB using a chip like this can easily cost thousands of dollars to re-do the PCBs.
@danielaKay The reason this chip looks like that is that it uses both high voltages and high currents on some of its pins, and the manufacturer only wanted to make the pins large and spaced apart that really need to be to reduce cost (metal is expensive) and to make the package as small as possible (saves space on the board).
@danielaKay In software engineering terms, this chip package is the equivalent of a web API that doesn't use JSON but instead uses a bespoke binary encoding to save bandwidth. Efficient in certain applications, but a PITA for everyone that has to deal with it.
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