Novel Silver-Palladium Electrolyte for Electrical Contacts

The paper presents the development of a novel cyanide-free silver-palladium electrolyte primarily for connector applications in the electronic industry. The use of this technology for high-speed deposition and selective reel-to-reel plating is discussed. Additionally the suitability of the coatings such as replacement for hardgold is a topic. Precious metals are important for a lot of electronic packaging applications. Those coatings ensure safe contact with high reliable transmission of electrical signals and data thus cannot be replaced easily. Such connector and packaging applications are applied in the automotive, telecommunications, medical and IT-Technology. Up to now gold is used mainly as contact material. Due to the strongly increasing gold price alternative cost saving materials such as palladium and/or silver or its alloys are on the focus. So far silver-palladium alloys are not common in electrolytic deposition procedures, whereas these alloys and its applications as electrical contact material are already described since decades. In addition silver and its alloys are mostly deposited out of cyanide containing electrolytes. Due to environmental and safety reasons since the last few years a reduction or complete elimination of cyanide is also on the target.