Ken, If you just do an immersion Au (over Nickel), which by process, will give you less than 10 u inches Au, embrittlement will not be an issue. If you need the Au to Au wire bond to, 30 u inches Au will do it with out embrittlement problems. Over 50 u inches of Au and you should start to be concerned...will depend on the solder joint sizes. You want to stay under 3% Au by volume (you can calculate it). As Jiri said, "the more Au the more embrittlement" and it will manifest itself visually as grainy solder, the more Au, the grainier. An alternative could be to do a selective Au plate of the 2 pads...cost issues. Regards, Bruce Misner -----Original Message----- From: TechNet [mailto:[log in to unmask]]On Behalf Of Bloomquist, Ken Sent: Wednesday, October 27, 2004 9:53 AM To: [log in to unmask] Subject: [TN] Gold Board Good morning TechNetters (at least here on the left coast), We have a small assembly that requires a couple of pads to be gold plated. We would like to gold plate the entire board but we're concerned about gold embrittlement when we solder the components in. The board is completely through hole and will be both wave soldered and hand soldered. Do you think we have any concerns? Oh by the way this is a class 3 assembly. Thanks, KennyB --------------------------------------------------- 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 -----------------------------------------------------