Steve:

You'll probably be OK but be aware that the adhesion of solder mask to gold may not be
as great as solder mask to copper.  I think IPC-6012 or IPC-SM-840 permit 0% removal of
mask from copper and 5 or 10% removal from gold.  You may not notice the difference.
My guess is that it would be more likely to have a failure over "plane" areas rather
than signals.

Oh yeah! If things ran smoothly, you wouldn't be working in the electronics industry.

Don Vischulis

"Stephen R. Gregory" wrote:

> Hi All!
>
> Remember my little problem with dry-film mask flaking off after multiple
> washes in Kyzen? Well, it's not that problem this time.
>
> We went to a different vendor and they used a DuPont dry-film...passed all
> the tests I through at it (thermal excursion through reflow, and multiple
> cleanings) passed without so much as a scratch.
>
> BUT I discovered another little problem now. We got our first batch of boards
> and they matched the drawing which called out SMOBC. We got some boards
> delivered a little later that were needed to complete the lot, and I noticed
> a lighter color over the traces and vias than the boards we got sent to us
> earlier. Me being a little "gun-shy" about masks, I looked at things a little
> closer and removed some mask over one of the vias, and discovered that the
> whole board had been gold plated. (there's PCI fingers on the board that need
> the gold)
>
> The big thing is that they didn't follow the drawing and give us SMOBC like
> the drawing states, but is there any real performance problems that I should
> be worried about? (Cripes! Can't things run smooth once inna while?)
>
> -Steve Gregory-

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