My limited experience is that you get a BIG savings.

Forget about the cost of the gold--that's not where the savings comes
from.  I presume you are using a reasonably dense SMT board for this
application.  The problem with dense SMT is that excess gold will
embrittle the solder joints, so if you put gold all over the board, you
will likely have too much for your smaller components--the worst parts
are either ceramic crystals/oscillators or DFN/QFN parts.  You may have
RF filters which are also problematic.  Anyway, it's likely you'll want
a selective plating operation to give you nice thick hard gold for the
contact fingers and some other surface finish for the SMT components. 
This introduces many more process steps.

The above reasoning only applies if you need the gold fingers to be
"tough" to survive multiple insertion cycles.  If you only have one or
two cycles, then ENIG will work, but that's way thinner than what you
mention.  ENIG is relatively cheap, and the gold cost savings due to
eliminating the fingers will probably be negligible.

Wayne Thayer

>>> [log in to unmask] 2/1/2007 11:33:04 am >>>
Fellow Tech Netters:

   What if any, is the COST savings from a vendor's point of view to
eliminate gold finger contacts from a wireless card application?  
Most
wireless cards have less than 30 fingers with 30 micro inches of gold
and 150 micro inches of nickel.   Are there any guidelines out there
and
what are some pit falls on this practice.

Victor,

---------------------------------------------------
Technet Mail List provided as a service by IPC using LISTSERV 1.8e
To unsubscribe, send a message to [log in to unmask] with following text
in
the BODY (NOT the subject field): SIGNOFF Technet
To temporarily halt or (re-start) delivery of Technet send e-mail to
[log in to unmask]: SET Technet NOMAIL or (MAIL)
To receive ONE mailing per day of all the posts: send e-mail to
[log in to unmask]: SET Technet Digest
Search the archives of previous posts at:
http://listserv.ipc.org/archives 
Please visit IPC web site
http://www.ipc.org/contentpage.asp?Pageid=4.3.16 for additional
information, or contact Keach Sasamori at [log in to unmask] or 847-615-7100
ext.2815
-----------------------------------------------------

---------------------------------------------------
Technet Mail List provided as a service by IPC using LISTSERV 1.8e
To unsubscribe, send a message to [log in to unmask] with following text in
the BODY (NOT the subject field): SIGNOFF Technet
To temporarily halt or (re-start) delivery of Technet send e-mail to [log in to unmask]: SET Technet NOMAIL or (MAIL)
To receive ONE mailing per day of all the posts: send e-mail to [log in to unmask]: SET Technet Digest
Search the archives of previous posts at: http://listserv.ipc.org/archives
Please visit IPC web site http://www.ipc.org/contentpage.asp?Pageid=4.3.16 for additional information, or contact Keach Sasamori at [log in to unmask] or 847-615-7100 ext.2815
-----------------------------------------------------