chip P98AB LVX4245 - possible solder issue?

I brought my empeg into work today to have a possible dry solder join fixed up - hey they have some fun tools here, might as well make use of them.
Anyways the guy that did the soldering had a look around the board and found a solder joint connecting two of the legs on this chip. See pic one, and a zoom in pic two.
Is this an issue or by design?

edit: sorry for the hugh pics, limited photo SW on work PCs.

Pic 1

Pic 2, zoom.

Let me look at my high rez pics of the board and see if it is there on mine too. Where exactly is that chip on the board? If it's on the display board, I don't have it.

Stu

Ignore it. Not sure if the solder bridge is intentional or not but they should be connected together.
The two pins are for power according to my datasheet CDROM. Look here for an online copy.

- Trevor

Good thinking.

Stu

thanks tman

Unlikely it is intentional. What happens is that there is a track running directly underneath between the two pins. When the board goes through the reflow oven, the solder paste easily bridges between the two pins since they are at exactly the same temp (I think thats the reason). For this exact reason we have started routing tracks like this either under the chip or outside the pins to prevent this sort of false alarm at board inspection time.

Yeah. I didn't think it was intentional.
Bit strange that the outer most pin is bent slightly though.

- Trevor

Bit strange that the outer most pin is bent slightly though

Yeah!, I'd hate to have that job on the assembly line

"and what do you do for a living"
"Well, there's this this itsy bitsy pin on a chip..........

Cheers, Sim

We had a bed of nails test rig so that sort of anomoly didn't cause any confusion.

I wish we still had that thing - it was a work of art.

Rob

Yeah, we use beds of nails for our stuff too. But there is still some amount of visual inspection before that.