Meehan, Alexis wrote: > > My company is investigating the use of entec versus gold immersion. Our > assembly > house is pushing for gold immersion, however, I believe entec is lower in > cost, right? > What are your experiences with either of these processes? Thanks in advance. > > ************************************** > Alexis Meehan Wavespan Corporation > Engineering Services 500 N. Bernardo Avenue > Tel: 650-237-8365 Mountain View, CA 94043 > Fax: 650-919-0191 http://www.wavespan.com > ************************************** > Alexis, I have a sheet from Tyco (Logan Division) on the Electroless Nickel/Immersion Gold Process. Some of the advantages it lists (over OSP coating) is longer shelf life, multiple soldering passes are possible, and no special handling is required. It also indicates a cost index of 1 for HASL, OSP and Immersion Gold (IG). Obviously they are recommending IG and are set up for it. Your board vendor costs could be different. We used IG on one board so far. Our QA folks are concerned about the reliability of the solder joints and the possibility of brittle joints, so I don't know if we will stick with it. The Tyco sheet listed 2 technical papers that I have been unable to find (maybe I don't know the right place to look): "An Investigation into the characteristics of Solderable Coatings for Printed Circuit Boards" K.J. Whitlaw "Effect of Au on the Reliability of Fine Pitch Surface Mount Joints," J. Glazer, P.A. Kramer & J.W. Morris Jr. If anyone knows where to find these papers, I'd like to read them or at least let our QA folks read them - it might ease their minds about IG. Hope this helps... Ben Davis Systems & Electronics Inc. St. Louis, MO [log in to unmask] ################################################################ DesignerCouncil 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 DesignerCouncil <your full name> To unsubscribe: SIGNOFF DesignerCouncil ################################################################ Please visit IPC's web site (http://www.ipc.org) "On-Line Services" section for additional information. For technical support contact Hugo Scaramuzza at [log in to unmask] or 847-509-9700 ext.312 ################################################################