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by exmadscientist
1454 days ago
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Pads are preferred over paste for two main reasons: low assembly cost and ability to fill gaps. Both are very important. If you have an application using a pad, and it's flat enough to replace with (good) paste, you will always see a performance improvement. I do not ever re-use pads. I have a used pad on my desk at work that shows an indent of the chip that was pressed into its other side... and you can read the part number and lot code laser marked into the chip. If the pad conforms to that but then can't relax back... it's never going to make good contact again. Full stop. (Granted, this was an extremely expensive thick gap-filler pad [TG-A9000, I think] for a particular application, and performance will vary.) |
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if the tolerances are tight enough, if the heatsink doesn't even touch the VRM thermal paste won't do nothing.