Working with tsop flash

[Adam Agnew]

Hi Kevin. I am skeptical that a beginner solderer could pull that off.
It's very very tiny work. However, a couple of us have contacted the
following gentleman, and his company gets the job done well and cheaply
(expect to pay a few hundred, which is preferred to a few dead
motherboards).

Henry Ho of Century Technology, Inc.
hho * century-technology * com
650 583 8908

There's no problem using an eprom programmer if you write a bad flash, but
its easier to just have a spare tsop flash chip (intel firmware hubs and
standard flash chips aren't interchangable however).

- Adam Agnew

On Sat, 27 Sep 2003, Kevin O'Connor wrote:

> Hi,
>
> I have a motherboard that I would like to get linuxbios working on.
> Unfortunately, it has a TSOP flash part that is soldered directly onto it.
> I am concerned that if I write to the flash I may turn the unit into a
> "brick".
>
> Has anyone had any experience with removing a surface mounted flash TSOP
> part, and replacing it with a ZIF socket?  If I understand it correctly, I
> should be able to heat up the leads of the current flash (melting the
> existing solder), extract the flash part, then solder on a zif socket
> (http://www.emulation.com/catalog/off-the-shelf_solutions/sockets/tsop/),
> and then finally use an eprom programmer on the existing tsop flash chip if
> it ever gets flashed incorrectly.  Is this correct - anyone here done this
> before?  Is this procedure very tricky (can one new to soldering expect to
> succeed at it)?
>
> Any advice would be appreciated,
> -Kevin
>
> --
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>  | Kevin O'Connor                     "BTW, IMHO we need a FAQ for      |
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