My appologies, I work largely on client/personal projects in the high speed digital/RF domain so my assumptions can be all over the place. Client budgets/deadlines leave little room for mistakes and my dexterity isn't what it once was so I use a PNP or make funky assembly jigs (my CV implementation/hands makes it easier to align with pins).
If you can, I'd really recommend talking to dentists who are retiring in your area or buying an XRay machine on ebay. They're pretty cheap and relatively safe and will open up a whole world of PCB fab. The problem with BGAs is the lack of feedback: if you have a chip with hundreds of pins and precise requirements for power boot up timing or dozens of impedance matched traces, figuring out what went wrong with your boards is literally impossible without proper inspection.
Since you have an intuitive feel for soldering BGAs already, I think that with a visualization of the solder joints you would be able to solder high pin count chips at small pitches. Most issues that I've experienced with complex BGAs are caused by mass manufacturing where you dont have the room to reflow every 10th board and you find out too late that a variable (from personal experience: el nino) has changed and reduced your yields by double digits. If you can take the time to do it right by hand, the sky's the limit.
If your back is against the wall you can also hotfix design mistakes like swapping two LVDS MIPI2 pins by using a laser drill to strip the plating on microvias at an angle to preserve the trace above it and resoldering them with wire only slightly bigger than IC interconnects. An almost completely useless skill but nothing beats the feeling you get when you can command RoHS compliant surface tension to do your bidding. Fair warning though: here be dragons.
I've noticed it a lot going to trade shows that the North American market has turned so much to the high end that most people assume you need all this fancy gear to make anything. Its really stifling innovation in my opinion. People think they needs tens of thousands to get an MVP prototype out the door and most of the time it kills the idea. If you are a big company and already have the resources then by all means use them, but someone with a good idea shouldn't think its required to build something new.
On the high speed digital front we do have 1Ghz DDR3 and its worked very well - we don't even use controlled impedance. Of course we are extremely careful to keep traces short and length matched. Our application can handle a very small error rate, however in practice we haven't seen any corruption at all in testing.
Its not the right approach if you are pushing the envelope of technology. But if you need a bit more grunt than an atmega by all means design in the ARM SoC and DDR3. You don't need fancy gear to do it.
Edit: Also thanks, we're looking into expanding more manufacturing in house and you've given me some ideas. I'll definitely look into an XRay machine.
I agree on the trade show front. I feel like the worst offender is LPKF: I've come close to losing a significant fraction of my client base twice because several clients insisted that $100-200k capex/support expenses were worth slightly faster (theoretically) prototyping speeds and the vastly higher NRE of learning how to design for the damn thing. We ended up sending 90% of the boards to a third party assembler anyway - delaying the completion of the project two months past my initial estimate with twice as many revisions as I had predicted. Literally the worst project of my career was caused by inability to say no to flashy new tech. Twice (Yeah, still bitter).
On the other hand, I designed a STM32F4 based design last year and it was glorious. SnapEda for all symbols/footprints, Altium design vault for a specialized FPGA design, and github for a STM32 reference design PCB file using the same layers/copper weights as my requirements with imported fab design rules for good measure. The PCBs cost like $1500 and assembly was only $1600. 10 years ago I used to pay that much per single board in quantities of 30, for roughly the same complexity. This time, the whole thing (minus firmware) took a weekend.
Good luck with your mfg! If you have a chance, please blog about your experiences. There arent enough people spreading the art of solder.
It's been a little while since I did proto boards, but I remember a vast chasm between industrial & hobbyist, that basically forced me to wrangle packages I had no desire to deal with. You could get 4GB DDR2 DIMMs, or you could get a DIP 8kB SRAM. For a microchip you could get TQFP-32, or BGA-1000. So on and so forth. I remember a useful chip that came in nothing but QFN-16.
It seemed like it wasn't I need fancy gear to make blinky lights, but rather for anything better than 8-bit, kilobyte, and low MHz, the only parts available was the fancy commercial stuff.
SMT soldering is seriously easy, I teach it to kids - people are just too scared by it - I've done small BGAs - hot air reflow, a fine tipped iron, and if you have old eyes like mine a stereo microscope are all you need.
I do occasionally do small (100+ pins) BGAs - for that I get a steel solder stencil made and use solder paste and a cheap Chinese reflow oven
I'm trying really hard to communicate that you can use these parts pretty easily. Just get a stencil made with your PCB it's another $40. Add in a toaster oven, some solder paste and tweezers and your all set.
Once you see how easy it is to reflow a board you won't want to bother with hand soldering DIP packages anyway.
If you can, I'd really recommend talking to dentists who are retiring in your area or buying an XRay machine on ebay. They're pretty cheap and relatively safe and will open up a whole world of PCB fab. The problem with BGAs is the lack of feedback: if you have a chip with hundreds of pins and precise requirements for power boot up timing or dozens of impedance matched traces, figuring out what went wrong with your boards is literally impossible without proper inspection.
Since you have an intuitive feel for soldering BGAs already, I think that with a visualization of the solder joints you would be able to solder high pin count chips at small pitches. Most issues that I've experienced with complex BGAs are caused by mass manufacturing where you dont have the room to reflow every 10th board and you find out too late that a variable (from personal experience: el nino) has changed and reduced your yields by double digits. If you can take the time to do it right by hand, the sky's the limit.
If your back is against the wall you can also hotfix design mistakes like swapping two LVDS MIPI2 pins by using a laser drill to strip the plating on microvias at an angle to preserve the trace above it and resoldering them with wire only slightly bigger than IC interconnects. An almost completely useless skill but nothing beats the feeling you get when you can command RoHS compliant surface tension to do your bidding. Fair warning though: here be dragons.