Mr. Koh: If I may speak openly for all my beleaguered collegues/customers, as they would be afraid to discuss this openly with Motorola... The most important characteristics of potential plating quality really cannot be measured in any programmable way, save by looking at results. It takes great understanding and intelligence to set up and run a plating process in the modern PCB facility, and no amount of ISO standardization can monitor that. You will certainly get vast amounts of data about "control" of plating systems, but at the end of the day, it is only slightly above a "black art", and the most important aspects, design of the tanks, and fluid flow, are not understandable to outside audit teams. Further, issues like plating rate, anode placement, etc. can change with every job. You can run test coupons with every load, but it will not tell you if the PCB is being plated correctly. Look at results on the PCB...that is the only real truth....the rest is largely window dressing, and often expensive and difficult to obtain window dressing. Rudy Sedlak RD Chemical Company --------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Technet Mail List provided as a free service by IPC using LISTSERV 1.8d 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 delivery of Technet send e-mail to [log in to unmask]: SET Technet NOMAIL To receive ONE mailing per day of all the posts: send e-mail to [log in to unmask]: SET Technet Digest Search previous postings at: www.ipc.org > On-Line Resources & Databases > E-mail Archives Please visit IPC web site (http://www.ipc.org/html/forum.htm) for additional information, or contact Keach Sasamori at [log in to unmask] or 847-509-9700 ext.5315 ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------