Surface treatment with plating or electropolishing are other type of surface treatments that allows us to support our customers making cutting edge medical products.
With our extensive offering of reel-to-reel electroplating, we can apply one or several metallic coatings on wires to improve characteristics such as electrical property, acid resistance of even aesthetic appearance. And with our ability to electroplate micro components we can make state of the art metallic coatings on very small parts.
Available electroplating treatments are silver, rhodium, palladium, copper, gold, fine gold, tin, and nickel.The typical deposit thickness range is 0.13 to 1.3 microns (5 to 50 micro-in.).
- Soft gold deposits are typically required for applications like ultrasonic wire bonding and static contact materials.
- Hard gold deposits are more common in dynamic contact applications.
- Nickel plating can be used as a diffusion barrier between the underlying base metal and gold plating layer when the modified surface is exposed to elevated temperatures.
- Nickel as an outer surface layer is an effective surface lubricant as well as a corrosion enhancement layer.
- Silver can be used to enhance the electrical properties of the wire and well as providing a more active surface for joining or other processes.