Martin,

The use of nickel or ENIG is not necessarily a "no- no" for RF circuits.
If your RF products have long strip lines than your designers may not
want to use PCB traces that are plated with nickel.  When you start
using many small size discretes and fine pitch IC packages many people
have found that HASL is not a good choice.  From a soldering standpoint
ENIG or immersion silver should work fine.  Because of the brittle
solder joint failure that have been associated with ENIG we decided to
use immersion silver for all of our PCBs.  It has been a good choice for
us and we've not had any reliability issue since 1997.

Regards,
George
George M. Wenger, Andrew Corporation
Reliability / FMA Engineer
Base Station & Subsystems Group
40 Technology Drive, Warren, NJ 07059
(908) 546-4531 [log in to unmask]
 

-----Original Message-----
From: TechNet [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Martin Butcher
Sent: Wednesday, June 15, 2005 5:15 PM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: [TN] RF board finishes

Hi All,

We are currently assembling an RF product (first time build) that
utilizes
several fine pitch devices, leadless fine pitch devices and a great many
0402's.  The board finish is currently HASL and as the volume ramps up
there
is concern that defects related to the fine pitch and HASL will result
in
unacceptable costs.

We prefer to use ENIG as a surface finish for non-RF products that fit
this
Bill.  I seem to recall reading something on this very Net that
mentioned
nickel or ENIG being a no no for RF ccts.

I am not an RF guy and would love to get some feedback as to the effects
of
various board finishes on RF products.  Perhaps even recommendations as
to a
"good" finish that will give better yield than HASL.

Regards,
Martin Butcher,

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