Electroless Copper Plating to Achieve Solderless Connections

As the world has woken up to the change in climate in recent years, people's environmental concerns are forcing companies to change and find ways to manufacture products without harming nature. One area of serious concern is the electronics industries where an ever-increasing number of products gets updated with sensors and microcomputers to be part of the internet of things. Wen more things are upgraded with electronics, it's important that the production process is as environmentally friendly as possible and that the techniques used introduces a minimum amount of disturbance to the circuits in them. To tackle this problem, this thesis presents a novel way of manufacturing PCBs without the need for soldering components, a method that increases performance and has substantial environmental benefits. When comparing conventional soldering to the electroless copper plating process presented in this thesis, electroless copper plating uses 67 times less metal and also reduces the parasitic capacitance in the PCB that comes from the solder joints. Utilizing the solder-free method means 67 times less metal needs to be mined, transported, and recycled. Moreover, since lead is a toxic heavy metal that is often part of the solder, decreasing its use in the industry is beneficial for human health and the environment. Nowadays, when the world steadily moves toward products that use technologies like 5G, technologies where higher frequencies are required, their sensitivity to capacitive disturbances from parasitics increases. In this thesis, when comparing the conventional solder method to the non-solder method to attach a capacitor, a significant reduction in phase shift of 0.9° is measured; this change is directly related to the removal of the solder and the parasitic capacitance that comes with it