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one of our Tech's here had a good idea of placing weight on the FPGA. After do this, it fired up properly 100% of the time. There must have been a problem with bonding the FPGA to the board (gold).
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For a fee, a commercial assembly house can perform an X-ray of the board through horizontal layers. Its like a hospital CT scan for a human. The X-ray resolution is fine enough to produce a slice at the PCB surface, the middle of the BGA ball, and the top of the BGA ball (at the package). Image recognition software is then used to check that each BGA ball is attached correctly.
If you consider the lost time debugging assembly issues, the cost of the X-ray inspection is not bad.
Cheers,
Dave
Honored Contributor
