Electroless Deposition in Electronics Applications

Many electroless deposition processes are very useful for the fabrication of various devices in the electronics industry. Significant importance for the electronics applications have metals such as silver, gold, nickel, copper, cobalt, palladium, and related alloys. All of these mentioned metals can quite simply and successfully be deposited via electroless deposition. 

The hard gold is used in electrical connectors, printed circuits boards, and mechanical arrays and it is produced by electrodeposition. The electrolytic methods (electrodeposition) are not discussed in this chapter. 

Composition and operating conditions of cyanide-based electroless gold deposition.30 

Reproduced with permission from ECS - The Electrochemical Society 

On the Ni-B substrate, Osaka28 noticed numerous crystals of uniform size after the initial plating period of 5 s. Contrarily, on the Ni-P surfaces only a small number of gold crystals were observed. The good adhesion and uniform deposition at the Ni-B surfaces were attributed to the density of nuclei produced at the initial stages of gold deposition. 

---