Chosen Solution
Hello, I got a dead iPhone 6 with water damage. It was shorted so I found out the short was at the back light driver. I went to remove it and it fell off the board along with most of the pads. The phone still works and is unlocked but does not have a backlight. I am using it with a flashlight right now and it seems to work fine. Here are pics:
Here’s what it looks like now when I tried removing the excess solder, now it does not turn on either.
Another pic after cleaning and polishing
Another pic, this time I know that pcb layer 2 is perfect and layer 1 has about 4/5 traces broken. Might be able to solder it not upside down if I run micro jumpers under it, looks salvageable.
Now I REALLY screwed it up, vccmain is only showing .20 to .40 volts and has no short, it is killing the battery and has no short there either. Tried to remove old copper but that didn’t end well.
After cleaning with acetone to make the traces more see able, it looks better when it has alcohol on it but when it dries up you cannot see the traces anymore.
Update: I had an idea. Since the board is almost unrepairable, I want to try something that almost no one does. Get the baseband, CPU, ram, NAND and the NAND eeprom and transfer then to an iCloud locked board. Touch ID did not work anyway so I can just take it to Apple and they can fix the Touch ID. An iCloud board is $20 and I have nothing to loose, if i do I correctly then I will have working phone minus Touch ID, if it does not go well I do not loose anything but a useless damaged board and a useless iCloud board. Seems easier then running all these wires and jumpers. I will get the board, 0.3mm solder, amtech 559 and new emi shields for it. May not be plausible but it is possible.
It looks like you have pulled the rest of the pads off for the backlight driver. If it is not turning on, you may have shorted a main voltage line to ground by scraping the pads too much (don’t work on phones now, but check input voltage for the IC). There is also a diode missing under the IC now, but I assume this is related to the backlight circuit and not a main voltage line? Do the above first, if it gets the phone working ultrasonic it to clean any corrosion and flux off the board. Then make a decision whether you want to put more time into this or not. If you can recover the majority of pads using a solder iron and light scraping, put a new chip on and run wires for the missing pads. If not, you can try securing the new driver upside down on the board, and run wires to the balls under the chip, if you want to have a fun project :)
@gigabit87898 if you are really bored and if the excellent answer by @reecee won’t work for you, you can always run some jumper wires :-) (Looks like a fun project)
Here’s a similar one I did, on a 6S Plus. Just saying that anything can be done if you put your brains and skill to it. It may not be economical, but it is doable. https://www.facebook.com/microsoldering…. (I hope this is not considered spam, I just have a hard time uploading pictures here because of my snail Internet). You can even glue the driver in a different location and run jumpers. You’ll need to be able at least to solder to a stub of the traces going underneath the CPU. Everything else is otherwise doable if you think out of the box.
