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Re: Gold plating the entire PCB

>Many years back Varian did gold plated PCBs. Some of these boards >still exist. Some may still even be in use somewhere. They were used >in early atomic clocks. It seems that they had a process that worked >because they had a very low failure rate on them.

Place I used to work, until they fired me, we did gold directly on copper for edge fingers. It had to be thick, 100 uin or more, to keep the copper from diffusing into the gold. Seemed to work fine. I think there can be problems soldering stuff like this, not to mention it's expensive.

Old HP and Tek boards were sometimes all gold, no solder mask. I don't know how thick it was, or if they used some barrier layer under the gold.

I'm going to have a pcb house make me a bunch of double-sided copperclad scraps that are gold plated on one side. Then I can make my high-speed breadboards, and they won't tarnish.

John

Reply to
John Larkin
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Strangely enough, when the price of gold started to rise, suddenly there were problems if you gold plated stuff.

Some Tek stuff used silver on ceramic for solder points. You had to use special solder but it seemed to work ok.

You can lay them out as a pattern and then cut the parts you need out with tine snips. If you have a 0.03 PCB made as a one sided board and then place it down on copper clad, it works a lot like the finished version.

Reply to
MooseFET

My Tek 475 has gold plated boards. Seems to work fine. Embrittlement? Pah, that's what you get for using dinky BGA's instead of a Real Man's through hole connections. Yeah, baby. :^)

Tim

-- Deep Fryer: A very philosophical monk. Website @

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Reply to
Tim Williams

Is this gold directly on copper, with no nickel?

Thanks, Rich

Reply to
Rich Grise

The "problems" have been known about for decades and no, it had nothing to do with the price of gold anywhere in the world.

Reply to
Hattori Hanzo

You must be Dimmy.

Reply to
MooseFET

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