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AUGUST 2026 I I-CONNECT007 MAGAZINE 125 Richard Nichols Marko Mirkovic Richard Nichols is technical marketing director, and Marko Mirkovic is the technical support and application director at GreenSource Engineering. Figure 6: The final ANOVA summary supports the three principal conclusions: a) Higher horizontal agitation improves distribution; b) Higher vertical agitation improves distribution; and c) Higher pump pressure reduces distribution. distribution, the broader implications become more relevant as PCB technology evolves. Advanced packaging, heavy copper designs, high-power electronics, and next-generation power conversion systems all demand tighter process control than previous generations of printed circuit boards. As conductor geometries shrink while copper thickness requirements increase, maintaining consistent plating becomes more challenging. The authors acknowledge that this work repre- sents only the beginning of the optimization process. Future studies incorporating four-sided panel contact, shielding, and additional electro- chemical refinements will likely further improve distribution. Nevertheless, the results establish an important benchmark. Acceptable plating uniformity was achieved before those conventional optimization techniques were introduced. That finding alone challenges the assumption that hardware modifications must always be the starting point for improving plating performance. Instead, it suggests that understanding the phys- ical behavior of the plating process itself may offer one of the most effective, and often overlooked, paths toward better copper distribution. As PCB manufacturing pushes toward tighter tolerances and more demanding applications, studies like this remind us that sometimes mean- ingful improvements come not from reinventing the chemistry, but from a better understanding of the physics already at work inside the plating cell. I-CONNECT007