Gaby - At a previous employer, we had a case where we designed the board to have the mask between the pads (HASL). The vendor had difficulty achieving a quality finish -the mask simply disappeared between leads upon curing. This vendor claimed we were overly cautious in designing the boards with the mask between the pads and that we were his only customer who was doing so for the 16 mil pitch. My comments are if you don't need masking between fine pitch pads [to prevent bridging], where else would you need it? That said, we used the boards without the mask between pads and did not have a bridging problem for paste, place, and reflow. Any manual rework of these parts, however, was obviously very difficult! Lainie Loveless Quad Systems ---------- From: TechNet Sent: Wednesday, June 24, 1998 11:16 AM To: [log in to unmask] Subject: [TN] Solder mask between fine pitc Hi, TechNetters! Could you please share with me your experience about pro and con's regarding solder mask between fine pitch-16mil- pads in relation to the finish of the PCB pads ? Not being greedy, I'll save the next question for after some answers. Thank you, Gaby ################################################################ TechNet E-Mail Forum provided as a free service by IPC using LISTSERV 1.8c ################################################################ To subscribe/unsubscribe, send a message to [log in to unmask] with following text in the body: To subscribe: SUBSCRIBE TechNet <your full name> To unsubscribe: SIGNOFF TechNet ################################################################ Please visit IPC web site (http://jefry.ipc.org/forum.htm) for additional information. For technical support contact Hugo Scaramuzza at [log in to unmask] or 847-509-9700 ext.312 ################################################################