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Immersion Silver with tarnish surface

Recently my customer encountered that when he opened up a vacuum pack of PCBs with immersion silver finished he found some SMD pads were slightly tarnished.He did a solderability test and found that the wetting was ok.

Is it a common sign to have slight surface tarnish and does not affect the solderability of the board?

Francis Er
Engineer - Singapore
2007

Silver Anti-tarnish Strips
silver_tarnish_strips

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Francis,
It is normal to have slight tarnishing, after all silver does tarnish. The slight tarnishing the customer is seeing should not affect solderability. You will want to keep an eye on the copper concentration in the silver bath however. There are products out there that can keep tarnishing at bay and are solder friendly. This website has suppliers of anti-tarnish products for electronics. Good Luck!

Mark Baker
Process Engineer - Syracuse, New York
2007

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