Eurocircuits, a European producer of small batch PCBs, has teamed up with Elsyca, a Belgian research company specialising in advanced electrochemical modelling, to implement PCB plating using Elsyca’s Intellitool technology.
Eurocircuit provides order pooling services which means different orders are combined on a single production panel. This reduces cost when manufacturing small batches of printed circuit boards.
According to the producer, increasing board complexity can create challenges for order pooling efficiency.
"With a complex mix of different designs on a single panel, traditional electroplating technology can lead to unacceptable variations in plating thicknesses both through the holes and on the board surface. This can be reduced by the use of robber bars and balancing patterns but these use up panel area and waste expensive copper and other materials," said Eurocircuits.
The approach developed by Elsyca reduces the impact of the layout pattern on material deposition on PCBs and semiconductors.
A traditional plating cell uses monolithic bar or basket anodes operating at a fixed current. This takes no account of the copper distribution pattern.
Intellitool uses a matrix of pin anodes, each of which is independently controlled by a simulation and optimisation program This program takes the pattern data of the PCB and calculates the current required to achieve the correct plating thickness for each segment, pin by pin, depending on the copper distribution.
The calculation also takes into account other parameters such as the design of the plating tank and the properties of the plating solution used.
"The plating process is driven fully automatically from the front-end engineering department in the same way as drilling, profiling, imaging and test equipment," said Eurocircuits.
Trials at Eurocircuits plant at Aachen in Germany have shown that the use of Intellitool has improved copper distribution across the production panels by 50%, allowing more efficient material utilisation.
At the same time plating times have been cut by 40%, increasing plant capacity but also reducing wastage of copper, chemicals and electricity.
Eurocircuits are now rolling out the new technology at their main production plant at Eger in Hungary.
http://www.eurocircuits.com/