Path: utzoo!attcan!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!ames!vsi1!wyse!mips!vaso
From: vaso@mips.COM (Vaso Bovan)
Newsgroups: sci.electronics
Subject: Re: Which is a better conductor: gold or silver?
Keywords: gold, silver, palladium, plating
Message-ID: <23544@quacky.mips.COM>
Date: 18 Jul 89 17:42:42 GMT
References: <14172@swan.ulowell.edu> <19729@louie.udel.EDU> <20483@cup.portal.com> <996@maestro.htsa.aha.nl> <1986@kodak.UUCP>
Reply-To: vaso@mips.COM (Vaso Bovan)
Organization: MIPS Computer Systems, Sunnyvale, CA
Lines: 16

In article <1986@kodak.UUCP> ornitz@kodak.UUCP (Barry Ornitz) writes:
>Often an extremely thin layer of gold
>is plated over silver to provide corrosion protection without seriously
>degrading the high conductivity of the silver layer.  In the chemical industry,
>connector corrosion on instrumentation is a severe problem.  It is even worse
>in the pulp and paper industry.  Heavy gold plating of printed circuit edge
>connectors is quite necessary.  On the custom PC boards we make, we first
>plate with nickel and follow with gold to avoid problems.
>                                        Barry

On the subject of gold plating, I have two questions:

1) How important, in gold plating of edge connectors etc, is it to have soft
   gold on one surface and hard gold on the other ?

2) How do the palladium alloy plating compare with gold plating ?