When Bardeen, Brattain, and Shockley won the Nobel Prize in 1956 for their invention of the transistor, the device could fit on the palm of your hand. In the following decades, semiconductor companies focused on packing as many transistors as possible in the same component. The ever-increasing logic available in a single device allowed us to build ever more complex components – from single logic AND gates to full-featured DSP and FPGAs. This complexity drove the increase in the number of pins needed to interface with the device. Since the pins were placed in the periphery of the component, components got larger while pins got smaller. So much so that by late 1970’s we had run out of real estate on the sides of the components to place pins. This was a major roadblock to the industry as it stifled the growth in complexity of electronic components. This problem was solved by Motorola in the early 1980’s when they introduced the ball grid array (BGA) to the market. The revolutionary BGA package opened up the area on the bottom of the component to place pins – now called balls. The era of bottom-terminated components (BTC) had begun. And so had begun the nightmares for engineers since they could no longer see the pins on the PCB.