A New PCB Surface Finish
Paper covers a new PCB surface finish that offers outstanding performance and excellent environmental protection.
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Authored By:
Frank Ferdinandi
Semblant Technologies
Melbourne, United Kingdom
Summary
A new PCB surface finish has been developed that offers outstanding performance and excellent environmental protection. This finish has the potential to replace more common finishes such as ENIG, ImAg, ImSn, ENEPIG, or OSP with a chemically resistant plasma deposited coating. The substitution of the wet processes with this dry plasma process offers significant advantages e.g. lower quantities of chemicals used, environmental benefits and improved operator safety.
The surface finish is applied to the whole board offering unique chemical protection before and after the soldering operation. A substantial test program has been undertaken investigating a wide range of performance characteristics of the PCBs including solder performance, corrosion resistance, electrical performance, RF performance and many other PCB performance characteristics
Conclusions
The results achieved to date clearly demonstrate that this Semblant Plasma Finish holds great promise with many attractive capabilities. It's been said that selecting the best surface finish for the application is the most complex and yet the most important decision one can make when developing a new Pb-free electronic assembly. The SPF introduced in this paper could make that decision much easier.
The stability of the Semblant Plasma Finish may also enable elimination of solder mask in some applications. As electronic manufacturers are pressured to become more green, this dry process for depositing a finish becomes even more attractive. Once the in-line plasma process completes development, this surface finish will be ready for higher volume applications
Initially Published in the SMTA Proceedings
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