Surface Finish

FAQ

• Are your boards ROSH compliant?
• Yes, the standard surface finish for our prototypes is Immerson Gold plating. This is Ni-Au finish over the laminate Cupper. Immersion gold and galvanic gold are the most expensive but the best ROHS compliant surface finishes on the market today.

• Why do you use Gold plating isn't it the most expensive?

• Yes, immersion gold is most expensive, but it's the best surface finish known in the industry today. The immersion gold finish have perfect even surface and excellent solderability and outperform all other ROHS compliant alternatives like SN100C (SnCuNi) HAL or immersion Tin not speaking for the organic coating (colophone+alcohol mix) over bare copper which is worst.

  The alternative pure Tin finish is cheap but suffer from these problems:

  Aging: you must assembly the boards as soon as possible after the tin finish application as the solderability decreases rapidly with the time and after few months you will not be able to solder your tin coated boards

  Tin whiskering - is very bad if your board needs to operate or be stored/transported at lower temperatures (do you know what is the temperature in the air cargo trunk?)

  Poor wetting when soldering increasing the risk for poor solder joints, so you need aggresively fluxes to be used in order to make good solder joint, which then should be carefully removed as they will oxidize your solder joints if remain not well cleaned

• Can you do my protos with SMOBC or HASL finish?
• No. We don't use SMOBC and HASL anymore, our only process now is ROHS compliant immersion gold.