Electrical Equipment

While precious metals such as Au, Ag, Pt, and Pd are finite materials, they are essential for electronic components and functional materials. Therefore, it is important to separate and extract the necessary precious metals from the final products and recycle them as high-purity precious metals in order to secure resources and reduce costs. Impurities, which must be controlled, include light elements such as carbon, sulfur, oxygen, and nitrogen. For example, Au (gold) used in electronic devices must be at least 99.999% pure.

We carried out plating thickness and composition analysis on dual-layer NiP/Au plating on Cu contacts on a flexible printed circuit using a HORIBA X-ray analytical microscope. We successfully detected Au of ultra-thin layer without any sample preparation. The thickness results of Au and NiP plating were consistent with the provided values and with good repeatability.

Our XGT-9000SL allows failure analysis at a microscopic level on a large sample, non-destructively, thanks to its large chamber capacity and its microprobes.

μ-XRF is a non-destructive analytical technique which can inspect defects, even non-visible ones, inside a sample because of the high penetration of X-rays. This application note introduces failure analysis to detect ion migration, voids, and foreign matter on electronics using the XGT-9000, with key features of the vertical irradiation of a 10 μm probe and the simultaneous imaging of fluorescent X-rays and transmission X-rays.

The penetrating nature of EDXRF analysis allows multi-layered samples to be characterised with a single measurement. With high spatial resolution even microscopic features such as bonding pads on circuit boards can be interrogated for composition and layer thickness.

Troubleshooting and defect analyses of components embedded within opaque resins are described, on both individual components and complete circuit boards. Quantitative analysis to the ppm level is ideally suited for ensuring compliance to the WEEE/RoHS directives.

The combination of the XGT-5000’s ground breaking spatial resolution and sensitivity means it is the instrument of choice for fast analysis of electronic components, whether for analysis of restricted harmful elements (the WEEE/RoHS ‘lead free’ legislation), trouble shooting, or R&D.