hi Scott from iFixit here and today I am
joined by dr. bill Cardozo from creative
electron thank you for joining us bill
Lishman some quick context if you don't
remember creative electron is
responsible for providing all of those
cool extra images we have on our tear
downs yeah I mean it's be great parking
weeks I speak so for the past few years
and you know much like iFixit our goal
was to bring highjack very interesting
attack to the masses I think one of the
cool things that I've you know I've
gotten to work with you guys on is is
the taptic engine in the iPhone 7 and I
remember we pulled out that tactic and I
mean you guys were able to actually take
x-rays and show up but when you're also
a term moving yeah I was really amazing
that we could actually get some
real-time x-rays because all we do is
real time and we're able to see the
device actually working up those rigs
ining yeah Mike like the taptic engine
we also have the Apple watch which was
still hard to get into and then once we
did get into it one of the coolest
things that s1 ship was completely
encapsulated in a silica aluminum resin
and you guys came along and saved the
day yeah that's incredible because that
the amount of electronics that was
packaging such a small space really
required that level packaging so we
thought an x-ray we can see you know
what's inside unless you completely
destroy the package so today bill you
actually brought us and scan to the
Apple earpods yeah so this is a scan
that we take me one of in one of our
machines they were called fusion through
view fusion CT and this acquisition was
taken using nine hundred images of the
same object so as we rotate this 360
degrees we took 900 images at each
little step and then we take all those
images and we crunch them to create this
beautiful volumetric images I know you
are you know an expert in tear downs so
you want to tell people they're looking
at here I want to ask you what we're
looking at because I have a ton of
questions for example we see a color
gradient can you talk to to that a
little bit yeah so cold gradient
something we at and we have different
color gradients that are available and
it basically pain
different densities so in this color
grading of looking at it goes from left
dance to more dance
so the Brad is dancer materials in this
analysis and we can see here the
microphone that the airport has so you
can see that little dot is an opening
for the microphone and that's the
microphone that's you know that kept
your voice and also the background noise
the huge battery as you make sure before
it well it's not as you know it's not
that huge right everything very usual
excuse there if you have the two
contacts for charging the choose or
right here and you can see the little
wire little flex that connects the that
the contact to the battery and this is
one of the areas where we can start
looking at you see how that is barely
touching the dead end of the battery
right so if for any reason that little
spring would was not connecting you know
it would we will be able to charge the
battery and there's the airport to be
dead so this is one of the fact that we
can find with the city that would be
very hard to find with a standard should
be x-ray so going here on of the the
rest of the air pod we have we have the
big speaker there that's the guy over
there and you have you notice the layers
of electronics that you guys loaded in
your cable right on its includes battery
management the sound amplification and
then the Bluetooth interface and you
know include the antenna right there you
can see clearly the antenna I see a so
we can see all these board level
components and almost make out
individual I mean we can make out
individual components are you able to do
Diagnostics like electronics can you
check solder mounds and absolutely okay
yeah so that's that's review right now
if you get the layer right you can
actually slice those ball grid arrays
for example and look for defects in the
connection between the ball grid array
with the BGA most of those components
are ball grid arrays so you can actually
slice and find a defect a common one in
industry nowadays we're call heading
pillow so how do you feel or ejp is when
the ball touches the pad on the board
but the ball itself doesn't collapse and
what happens is that sometimes you have
connectivity sometimes you don't that's
recall heading peel so that's something
that 2d x-ray cannot find LR it's very
challenging to find but with the
monitors you can because notice on a lot
is lysine that the volume and then you
can find that interface if it's done
correctly or not that kind of brings to
memory touch disease which was found in
certain iPhones they were thinking that
that that issue was related to ball grid
arrays with this technology allow you to
identify if there was a faulty solder
joint
absolutely so here you can see an
example where by reconstructing that
through dimension volume on each one of
those balls you can clearly see if a
ball is correctly attaching the
component to the board or not so
fortunately the case of the airport I'll
this all the joints look ok but if they
weren't to be able to see the separation
between the component and the board
which was one compromise for such
disease well bill thank you for being
here and bringing this awesome tech with
you I really look forward to seeing it
on future teardown it was great spending
time with you and thanks
you
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