gold plating
Anyone familiar with gold plating for rf chassis? I know of different types, namely hard gold and soft gold. Also on the purity, eg 99.99% emulsion gold. What are the considerations for deciding what type of gold plating to use? Any useful documents? Thanks.
Hi;
I know no thing about this subject. Can you explain me more?
Well, Au plating is required for many purposes,
On Hybrid layouts, especially at uwave and mm frequencies, gold wire bonding is used. Au wire better adhere over a SOFT GOLD surface.
Soft gold is a "pure" metal (not an alloy).
Contacts (like central pin of a SMA connector) are HARD GOLD plated, an Au alloy is used. In this case the plating is needed to preserve the core metal for corrosion /oxidation.
Chemical mixure used for the galvanic plating are covered by patent.
As stated above, all uses are for corrosion and adhesion purposes. Gold is slightly less conductive than silver or copper so it does not improve the microwave transmission performance.
Many years ago HP gold plated the PC traces in all of their products. I suspect that this is the origin of the phrase "gold plated design" which is used to describe a design that has the manufacturing cost increased beyond the point where any real usefulness is improved.