Issue link: https://iconnect007.uberflip.com/i/612684
December 2015 • The PCB Magazine 95 corrosion you see does not mean that this is a bad product. This is something new that we thought the industry needed. We also wrote a test method for TM650 on the measurement of phosphorous and nickel in a nondestructive test method. It is based on XRF fluorescence. We submitted it to the 7-11 Test Methods Subcommittee yesterday and they were flabbergasted. They've never seen any committee do so much work to verify that a test method works and is reproducible. They were very impressed. Then they said we cannot pub- lish this method without having it referenced somewhere in a specification that says "This is what you do." We aren't just going to put out this method for nothing. We have to go back and revise the ENIG specs to make sure that during the setup you meet your supplier/vendor specification in phosphorous. We are not going to say accept a number based on the supplier/vendor spec. Goldman: You also mentioned ENEPIG finish, which I believe stands for electroless nickel/electro- less palladium/immersion gold. Milad: With the ENEPIG we needed something very quickly. We put out ENEPIG in 2013 and this year we have issued an amendment of EN- EPIG. The initial ENEPIG said minimum 1.2 microinches for the gold and that is where it stopped. Now we have put an upper limit also. We said a minimum of 1.2 to 2.8 microinches. That is very important because a lot of design- ers were designing saying we want five, or eight microinches of gold, and the process is not ca- pable of doing that. Goldman: Immersion of gold can never be very thick. Milad: They were messing up the nickel and the palladium. So we thought that it was very im- portant to do this and finalize it completely. The draft was written and it was peer reviewed and everything. It's already in print right now. The important thing for people to realize also is that when you are calling out to spec, you have to call out the latest revision of the spec and don't just call out 4556—you have to call out 4556 rev-a. Goldman: Or, it would be nice if they could call out the spec and it would automatically go to the latest revision. So that all of those earlier revisions could just disappear. Milad: That would be a good way of doing it. That is a very good suggestion. I should talk to the IPC and see if they would just keep the latest. Goldman: And then you have to get that through to the customers, who sometimes want to stick with what they have. Milad: Our customers are not the users of the specification. We deal with the PCB manufac- turers. The users of the specifications are the OEMs and the designers. Goldman: So the manufacturers have to deal with them? Milad: Yes, and so we have to make sure that we close the loop. Goldman: In your subcommittee do you have a lot of representation beyond chemical suppliers? Do you have some of the PCB companies and also some of the EMS companies? Milad: We have everybody. We have something like 50–60 people on the committee. We oper- ate very differently than most. We operate by a one-hour biweekly conference call. So every two weeks we discuss and update and make de- cisions about how we are going to be running tests, who is going to do what, who is going to FeATure inTerview UYEMURA USA'S GEORGE MILAD ON UPDATING FINAL FINISH SPECS " our customers are not the users of the specification... The users ... are the oeMs and the designers. "