[sdiy] IC socket reliability

[Dave Brown]

I agree whole heartily.  I do repairs on vintage Tektronix products at the
vintageTEK.com museum and those with sockets are a real issue.  If I used a
socket in a design, I would almost always go with the machined pins because
of their quality.  However, I have done some recent DIY repairs where
machined pin sockets were used and they were just lousy.  They were loose
and really poor quality and barely contacted the IC pins.  I suppose it is
like anything else where there are cheap versions of everything out there.
One last word on sockets ... think tin on tin and you've answered your own
reliability question.

At Tektronix in the 70's we used TI sockets which we thought were good, but
it turns out they wiped on the edges of the pins, not the sides.  The edges
of IC pins had poor tolerance so there were many reliability issues later
on.  In fact just finished replacing all the ROM sockets of a 1978 4025
terminal processor board and that's all that was needed to restore it to
operation.

Dave

-----Original Message-----
From: synth-diy-bounces at dropmix.xs4all.nl
[mailto:synth-diy-bounces at dropmix.xs4all.nl] On Behalf Of Paul Schreiber
Sent: Sunday, January 20, 2013 6:05 PM
To: 'synthdiy diy'
Subject: Re: [sdiy] IC socket reliability

For people who think adding IC sockets makes their systems "better":

http://www.applelogic.org/AIIIDesignBugs.html

No reason to socket *any IC* unless:

a) it is rare and/or costly. A TL074, LM3900 or LM324 do not meet these
criteria.
b) you expect it to be swapped out/reprogrammed in the next 5 years. After
that, might as well make a revised pc board.

If you think having sockets "Makes my design more repairable in the future"
you need a whippin'.

Paul S.
/President of No Sockets or Banana Jacks society // use a 30u Ag mil-spec
socket on the MOTM-510 because the IC that goes in there is $65 /// socket
costs as much as most 16bit MPUs


_______________________________________________
Synth-diy mailing list
Synth-diy at dropmix.xs4all.nl
http://dropmix.xs4all.nl/mailman/listinfo/synth-diy