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Ted Mooney, P.E. RET
Pine Beach, NJ
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for Metal Finishing since 1989
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Electroplating for a double side PCB in home/college
Dear Sir,
My name is H.Ganesh and working in ECE/PG-Department in Sona college of Technology at Salem. We are interested to educate the student's for making a PCB with double side.We learned about all except the see through plating for holes contact between the double side tracks.
We need the solutions for making the same.
I tried with Stannous chloride, first I drilled the double side PCB and directly immersed in the copper sulphate
⇦this on
eBay or
Amazon [affil links] solution and given the supply with copper anode,but after some time I rinsed with water and see that one side of the hole was completely vanished.Then I make a another board drilled and dip with stannous solution(just taken 5 gram of Stannous chloride mixed with 50 ml of water) for sometime and dried it .Then I immersed in the copper sulphate solution and seen that the holes are got electroplated but when I rinsed with water all the copper inside the PCB are vanished . So I need the better solution for same to make a double side PCB with all the holes should be electrically connected.
I came to know that electroplating can be done with non conductive elements,so I took a 5*5 cm plastic sheet and dip with the stannous solution and dried it.I seen that the plastic sheet was become a light white colour coated layer and I checked the end to end point with multimeter and it shown 1.5 meg Ohms and after that I tried with copper sulphate solution for electroplating but it won't happen and the deposit of stannous chloride was dissolved with the copper solution and colour of the copper sulphate solution becomes light blue.So Please give us a proper way to achieve the electroplating with double side copper board.
This will be more useful for our college and I requested you to give us a detailed formula for the same.
Sona college of Technology - Salem, Tamil Nadu, India
2006
I would like to help but I should warn you that you have chosen one of the most complex processes in our industry.
There are a number of variations on the basic process but to give an idea of what ia involved.
Double sided copper clad fibreglass board is the starting point. Drill holes to the pattern required (the quality of the hole surface is critical) The chemical processes all have rinses between which I have shown as R. Preclean (alkaline)R microetch copper (ammonium persulphate or sulfuric/peroxide) R Sensitise the non conductive hole surface (palladium chloride/ stannous chloride) R Activate ( to remove tin and leave colloidal palladium on the plastic) R Electroless Copper ( this is a non-electrolytic bath. The chemistry is complex and you should contact a specialist supplier) R Jig and electroplate (copper sulphate requires specialist additives to plate down holes) R Dry Print circuit image in resist (photo resist or screen print), Plate tin/lead, strip resist Etch circuit (ammoniacal etch or sulfuric/peroxide)
That is the simple version for lab use - Good Luck !
Geoff Smith
Hampshire, England
2006
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