Repair glossary

Every trade gets its own shorthand, and board work is no different. These are the terms we use on job sheets and in quotes, defined the way we would explain them across the bench — useful when a supplier, a customer or a YouTube video assumes you already know them.

Board work

Board-level repair

Fixing the device’s main circuit board itself — the failed chip, connector or trace — instead of replacing the whole board. It is the difference between “this board is dead” and “this board has one dead part on it”.

Micro-soldering

Board-level work done under a microscope: replacing components, connectors and chips that are far too small to work on by eye, usually with hot air and an iron measured in tenths of a millimetre.

Component

Any single part on the board — a resistor, capacitor, chip, connector or crystal. “Component-level” repair means replacing the part, not the board.

IC / chip

Integrated circuit: a package containing a whole circuit, from a tiny logic gate to a phone’s processor. On modern boards, most of what fails is inside one.

BGA

Ball grid array — a chip package that connects to the board through a grid of tiny solder balls underneath it, invisible once fitted. BGA work needs hot air or infrared rework, not an iron.

Reballing

Removing a BGA chip, cleaning it and fitting a new set of solder balls so it can be refitted. Usually the last option for a failing chip, because the board and the chip both survive it only once or twice.

Reflow vs. rework

A reflow heats a joint or area so the solder re-melts and connects again — quick, but often temporary. Rework removes and replaces the actual component; it is the fix, where a reflow is often a delay.

Chip-off

Reading a device’s memory chips directly, off the board, in a dedicated reader — used for data recovery when the device cannot power on. It is board work and data recovery at the same time.

NAND, eMMC, UFS

The families of memory chip that hold phone and laptop storage, soldered to the board rather than slotted. “Soldered storage” on a ticket usually means one of these.

Torn pad, lifted trace

The damage left when a component is pulled off a board too roughly: the copper pad or the hair-thin trace it sat on comes away with it. Repairable more often than people assume, with a microscope and steady hands.

Donor board

A scrap board of the same model, kept for the parts that are no longer sold separately. A lot of board repair is really careful organ donation.

Diagnosis

Short circuit

A path where current flows straight to ground, usually making heat somewhere it should not. Finding the short is most of a dead-board diagnosis.

Open circuit

A path that should conduct and does not — a broken trace, a cracked joint, a dead fuse. The opposite of a short, and often harder to spot.

Continuity

Whether a path conducts at all. Checking continuity between two points answers “is this trace broken?”.

Diode mode

A multimeter mode that checks components and rails against ground without powering the board. The first measurement in most board diagnoses, because it finds shorts before they cause more.

Schematic

The manufacturer’s map of the board: every component, every net, every value. Without one, board repair is guesswork through a microscope.

Boot loop

A device that restarts over and over instead of finishing its start-up — often power delivery, storage or firmware. The loop itself is the symptom, not the fault.

Backlight

The lighting behind a screen. A phone with a working touchscreen but a black screen is often a backlight circuit fault, not a dead screen — worth diagnosing before a screen is sold.

Data recovery

Logical recovery

Recovery that works through the device’s file system: deleted files, formatted drives, corruption, failing but readable drives. No soldering; the data is walked out, file by file.

Firmware / translator

The drive’s own control software, which maps the areas you read to the physical platters underneath. Translator faults imitate all kinds of nastiness and are often fixable on the bench.

Head crash

A read/write head touching a platter. The head usually survives worse than the data — which is exactly why a clicking drive gets powered off, not “tested”.