What do you mean?
If customers want gold they will pay for it. I saw cellphones in golden cases. However, my question was, how reliable s what is inside, how good is sound quality, how well is reception?
If your gear is reliable and performs as real High End, why they don't pay for golden look?
We have moved on to high quality solder mask for new Vendetta, CTC Blowtorch, and Constellation. We also use Teflon board material. It works about as well, and easier to solder. For people who most probably rarely use gold, many contributing here certainly have strong feelings about using it.
Gold plating is now obsolete for my needs, but it certainly was pretty.
Gold plating is now obsolete for my needs, but it certainly was pretty.
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As a young engineer (aged 24 or so) one of my first projects was a 8 bit 20 MHz digitizer with a HUGE ADC made by TRW, abt. 1 square cm of silicon, the best one could buy on the open market at that time. I was sooo proud on my contiguous GND plane....
...until an old fart took a Dremel, cut a slot into my plane and S/N went up by 16 dB.
regards, Gerhard
(that does not mean that I endorse the layout that was on the Japanese web site.)
Hello Gerhard,
I would like to ask you a question about the Dremel cut slot. Were there any tracks on the other side of the board that passed over the slot?.
Regards
Arthur
Gold on Ni barrier does not cost much more than hot air levelled tin
as the thickness is so small that the material cost is close to nothing.
The process was developed because hot air levelled boards are not
flat enough for 0402 and smaller SMD parts. The amount of gold is
so tiny that it cannot really mess up the solder joints.
Still looks good, and after all, HiEnd Audio is bling jewellery in the first place.
Nevertheless, for our boards that are going into space, we have
to strip the gold from transistor and IC leads in a pre-tinning bath
and that step has to be documented and signed.
Semiconductor makers prefer not to have gold in the fab because
it is a potent process poison. Some need it for the metallization
of microwave power transistors where they have huge current
densities. The same goes for Cu metallisation introduced by
IBM and Intel a few years ago. It was a major effort to keep it
in the metal layer.
There were some digital clock generation and output buffers on the board, but
nothing that crossed through the reference & input amplifier. The ADC was
a huge chip, you can see the the final board in the blurred part of the
third picture in
http://www.hoffmann-hochfrequenz.de/project_gallery/project_gallery.html
Most of the analog stuff was moved into the machined box on the EuroCard below.
Later I put it all on a single card, including the digital signal processing, and
the SNR was even better.
I seriously must update my web site, nothing new since 2005...
Hello Gerhard, I know that you can 'slot' a board to get improvements - but then the designer needs to know what they are doing and why. My comment on the CT board was that I saw GP and then lots of top tracks (which spilt the GP in a haphazard way) which simply for the most part negated any GP.
Yup. And quite well behaved, no discontinuities.
You running a MAC or a PC? When I purchased my combo unit, I ended up calling MAC tech support, there were OS updated needed. No problem afterwards, it does all three.
Well Excuuuuuuse me. Who do you think you're talking to??? I'll have you know that I SQUAT-ZOLA about jfet noise..
But seriously, your verbal description about the data you were citing w/r to cryogenic changes made no sense, your explanation was leaning way too close to magic which it certainly is not.
At a previous company, we used gold to increase recovery speed of the diodes, it provided recombination sites so that diode recovery did not require sweeping the zone clean. The problem was, gold made the devices very leaky at elevated temperatures near 125C as well as losing recombination ability up there. Diodes made this way tended to have issues with thermal runaway due to reverse recovery losses.
Do you have to do a surface finish post plating? Seems like plated copper is too rough for those frequencies, and I would think vias are also issues..
Who is the "we" you refer to? In my opinion, there is significant intellectual firepower posting on this thread alone who can easily discuss these points.
Wow. Instant dissolving upon contact with solder, and major embrittlement as a result.. I remember those days.
Cheers, jn
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Gold doping was also the trick behind the old 74H series (as 74H74, not HC)
But Schottky worked much better.
Gerhard
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