Cybershield

Selective Electroless Plating Plastic

Selective Electroless Plating Plastic

Selectively Electroless Plated Plastic is applied onto specified surfaces of a plastic part, most often an enclosure or housing but can be applied to a wide range of part designs and materials. The selective plating process is suitable for low volume as well as high volume applications and includes:

• Masking the plastic part
• Hand masking prototypes and low volume production quantities
• Mask with custom electro-form masking fixture for moderate and high volume production quantities
• Spray plating catalyst onto the areas where plating is required..
• The catalyzed parts are loaded into a plating fixture and immersed into an electroless plating chemical tank to deposit copper plating onto specified areas. The chemical make-up of the catalyst draws out copper metal from of the plating solution and deposits 99.9% pure copper uniformly onto the catalyzed surfaces.
• Nickel is then plated over the copper to protect the highly conductive copper from corrosion and abrasion
• Typical selective plating plastic system is comprised of 10 to 20 micro-inches (0.25-0.50 µm) nickel over 80-240 micro-inches (2.0-6.0 µm) copper

Selective electroless plating on plastic attributes include:

• Throughout the plating process, the parts are never exposed to aggressive chemistries; therefore, the molded-in-cosmetics of the plated plastic part are not affected, including color and texture.
• Offers highly conductive surface with resistivity of 15-50 m-ohms/square
• Excellnt EMI shielding RFI shielding is attained, with 60-85 dB attenuation over frequencies from 30 MHz to 10 GHz
• ESD protection by utilizing the plated plastic conductive coating to disperse the static charge.
• Cybershield can produce selective plated parts up to 40 inches X 60 inches X 18 inches.
• Plastic resins suitable for selective plating are:
• ABS
• Polycarbonate (PC)
• PC/ABS
• Ultem
• Nylon/PPA