There are four main electroplating methods in the production of PCB printed circuit boards: finger plating, through-hole plating, reel-linked selective plating and brush plating. Let's take a look at the first case! Finger Plating: Precious metals need to be plated on PCB edge connectors, edge joints or gold fingers to provide lower contact resistance and higher wear resistance. This technique is called finger plating or overhang plating. Gold is usually plated on the inner nickel coating of the protruding contacts of the edge connector. The gold finger or the protruding part of the board edge adopts manual or automatic plating technology. Gold plated on contact heads or gold fingers has been replaced by rose gold, lead plated and plated buttons. Circuit board production refers to the electroplating process as follows:

Strip the coating to remove the tin or tin lead coating protruding from the contacts.

wash water rinse

scrub with abrasive

Activated immersion in 10% sulfuric acid

Nickel plating on the protruding contacts to a thickness of 4-5μm

Clean and demineralize water

Gold permeate treatment

gold plated

cleaning

drying