Yesterday at work, we did an Achievement™:
Successfully (we think) soldered an MSOP-10EP, including the exposed pad (which was on a large ground plane with thermal vias, too!)
There were a couple solder bridges we had to fix and we're hoping the high temperatures of the hot air rework station we used to solder the exposed pad didn't damage it (haven't got all the passives around it soldered yet so can't turn it on to test) but we did it, tested continuity with a multimeter and no shorts
-R/F
rambling about soldering, long
MSOP-8 has the same pin pitch as SSOP, 0.65 mm, but MSOP-10 and larger has a pin pitch of 0.5 mm, smaller than anything else we've soldered before. We've also never used a hot air station before, or dispensed solder paste
But we just went for it and i think were successful enough to make it work
we actually got a new soldering iron just for it (though not a whole new station; we already had a Weller WX2 station and we got a WXPP "pico" soldering iron for this), as well as a hot air rework station (a really cheap one from Yihua, then when that kept blowing a fuse and the motor made weird noises, returned that and got a slightly less cheap one from Sparkfun that worked perfectly)
our boss was surprisingly amenable to the cost of this equipment
the soldering tip we used was an RTP 001 C MS, which has a 0.1 mm tip radius, which is tiny--but fits between the pins of an MSOP-10
used leaded solder because we didn't want to take any chances, normally we use lead-free
did use lead-free solder paste though, partially because it was cheaper
-F/R
