Hi Tecnetters, I hope you all had a good X-mass. One of my colleagues asked me to present a question to this forum. We are manufacturing PCBs with electroless nickel - immersion gold ( ENIG ) finishing, using Atotech chemistry . Most of the boards are very dense SMD , fine pitch , BGA etc . All boards are passing through ECT and visual inspection before ENIG . According to him, we are facing , from time to time , a phenomena of plated ENIG on the Solder Mask and /or on text, resulting in shorts ( which are extremely small) . These shorts cannot be found by visual inspection, only by ECT. The changes we made so far in our production in order to minimize the problem are: 1 ) Higher exposure energies and longer curing time for Solder Mask 2 ) Lowering activation ( palladium ) before electroless nickel 3 ) Improving rinses (including agitation) , after palladium But still we are getting these shorts from time to time We think that considering the ENIG process , we are close to skip most plating problems . If any of you, wise ones, has a practical advice as to eliminating our problem, we will be grateful. Best regards, Yehuda Weisz