PCB Plating

Rare metals need to be plated on board edge connectors, board edge bumps or gold fingers to provide lower contact resistance and higher wear resistance. This technique is called pcb gold finger plating or protruding plating. In the PCB gold plating process, the operation requirements of selective gold plating PCB and electroless copper plating PCB are relatively high. Especially in the thickness of PCB copper plating and PCB gold plating and PCB hardness gold thickness, the requirements for high quality are higher. Gold plating is usually plated on the inside of the board-side connector, protruding from nickel. Manual or automatic plating of fingers or plate edges. Contact plug or gold finger gold plating is electroplating and plating. Replace the plated button. The steps involved in finger plated are:

1. Choose prominent professional PCB assembly equipment that can meet your needs. Then, remove the coating. The purpose here is to remove the tin-lead coating.
2. Rinse the protruding contact head thoroughly with water.
3. Scrub with abrasives.
4. Place the protruding contacts in activated immersion solution of 10% H2SO4 (sulfuric acid).
5. Use a thickness of 4-5 microns. When you do, paint the protruding contacts with nickel.
6. Take the time to clean the protruding contacts. The reason for this step is to remove mineral water.
7. Treatment (gold infiltration).
8. Continue with gold plating.
9. Clean the protruding contacts correctly.

There are many ways to form an ideal coating on the borehole substrate wall. This is called pore wall activation in industrial applications. The commercial production process of printed circuits requires multiple intermediate tanks, each of which is stored. Storage tanks have their own control and maintenance requirements. Pcb through hole plating is an indispensable drilling process in the PCB manufacturing process.
As the drill bit passes through the copper foil and the substrate underneath, the heat generated will cause the insulating synthetic resin that makes up most of the substrate to melt, melting the resin and other drilling debris. It gathers around the hole and is applied to the newly exposed wall of the copper foil, which is actually harmful to the subsequent plating surface. The molten resin also leaves a thermal layer on the substrate wall that has poor adhesion to most activators. Plated through holes requires the development of a technique similar to decontamination and etching chemistry.
Prototyping of PCB Hole Plating. A suitable prototyping method is to use specially designed low-viscosity inks to form a film with high adhesion and high conductivity on the inner wall of each via. This eliminates the need for multiple chemical treatments. Only one application step is required, followed by thermal curing, forming a continuous film on the inside of all hole walls, which can be plated directly without further processing. This ink is a resin-based material with strong adhesion that can be easily bonded to most hot-polished holes, eliminating the need for etching steps. Learn more about other PCB inks.

The pins and pins of electronic components such as connectors, integrated circuits, transistors and flexible printed circuits are selectively plated for good contact and corrosion resistance.
This plating method can be manual or automatic, and the individual selection of each pin is very expensive, so batch soldering is necessary. The metal foil is usually flattened to the desired thickness end for die-cutting, chemical or mechanical cleaning, and then selectively used, such as nickel, gold, silver, iridium, button or tin-nickel alloy, copper-nickel alloy continuous plating nickel-lead alloy, etc. In the selective electroplating method, the part of the metal copper foil plate that does not require electroplating is first coated with an anti-corrosion film, and only the selected copper foil part is electroplated.

Another method of selective plating is called “brush plating”. This is an electrodeposition technique in which not all parts are immersed in an electrolyte. This electroplating technique only electroplates a limited area and has no effect on other areas.
Typically, rare metals are plated on selected parts of the printed circuit board, such as edge connectors and other areas. Brush plating is more commonly used for scrap board repair in electronics assembly shops. Special anodes (chemically reactive anodes such as graphite) are wrapped in an absorbent material (cotton swab) to bring the plating bath where it is needed.

Side plating is the metallization of the edge of the circuit board in a PCB. Edge plating, frame plating, plating profiles, side metal, these words can also be used to describe the same function.
Pcb side plating process: Drilling – Milling plating baths – cleaning – copper sinks.
Possible applications for side plating: Improve EMC performance by shielding multilayer internal areas such as HF boards.
The edges are used as a cooling function for additional cooling surfaces, and active heat dissipation can be used Cabinet connection, Board-to-board connection.
Design parameters: To ensure the productivity of side plating, overlapping copper (copper surfaces, pads, or traces) must be used to define metallized areas in the CAD layout. Minimum overlap: 500 m. On the connection layer, at least 300um of connecting copper must be defined. In the plated copper process, there should be a gap of at least 800m between the copper above the unconnected layer and the outer contour.
Since manufacturers need to secure the PCB to the production panel during this process, they cannot plate the entire edge. Therefore, some clearance is required when placing path labels. Manufacturing a circuit board using edge plating requires the layout of the board that requires edge plating before starting the through-hole plating process. This does not include the V-cut part of the plate that requires edge plating.