ClassOne Technology, Kalispell, Montana, announces that its Solstice gold plating systems can save money for makers of electronic devices by eliminating gold waste, reducing the amount of gold needed, and simplifying the gold plating process.
“One fundamental advantage of Solstice electroplating is its elimination of gold waste,” explained Kevin Witt, President of ClassOne Technology. “Previously used CVD and PVD methods deposited gold not just on the wafer, but also on the entire chamber interior. That ‘oversprayed’ gold was difficult to remove and inefficient to reclaim — which led to a considerable net loss of gold. By contrast, Solstice deposits only on the wafer, so there’s no gold waste, and no need for cleaning or gold reclamation efforts.”
Solstice economies also come from its higher gold deposition speed. Plating at 150 to 300nm/min, it is roughly ten times faster than CVD and PVD methods. In addition, Solstice starts processing immediately, because it does not require an hour or more for pump-down as vacuum-based tools do. All of this translates to additional savings from higher throughput and more cost-efficient production.
The unique eight-chamber design of the Solstice S8 enables it to readily replace a solid gold layer with a multi-metal stack — and reduce gold usage very substantially. For example, a feature that previously required a five-micron layer of solid gold can now be replaced with a “sandwich” of 0.25µm gold, 1µm nickel, 2.5µm copper, another 1µm nickel, topped with 0.25µm gold — to achieve equivalent functionality while reducing gold usage by a factor of ten. And Solstice’s multi-chamber design enables it to deposit all five layers in a single cycle, meaning that no additional process steps or time are required to gain very significant cost savings.
