Electroless selective plating plastic is a popular choice with our customers to address:
- EMI RFI Shielding
- ESD dissipation
Contact Cybershield to review your requirements or to discuss design options. We will promptly respond to your phone or email inquiry and provide technical assistance to help you design a cost effective product design.
Most often, selective plating on plastic is applied to interior surfaces of enclosure or housing but can be applied to a wide range of plastic part designs and materials. The process is suitable for low volume as well as high volume applications. The selective plating on plastic process includes:
- Masking the plastic part
- Hand mask prototypes and low volume production quantities
- Mask with custom electro form masking fixture for moderate and high volume production
- Apply autocatalytic primer, which is applied to the areas where plating is required. This process consists of spraying selective plating catalyst onto the part followed by cure step
- The catalyzed parts are loaded into plating fixture and immersed into electroless plating chemical tank to deposit copper plating onto specified areas. The chemical make-up of the autocatalytic primer draws out copper metal from of the plating solution and deposits 99.9% pure copper uniformly onto the primer.
- Nickel is then plated over the copper to protect the highly conductive copper from corrosion and enhances scratch and wear resistance
- Typical selective plating system is comprised of 10 to 20 micro-inches (0.25-0.50 µm) nickel over 80-240 micro-inches (2.0-6.0 µm) copper
Selective plating attributes include:
- Throughout the plating process the parts are never exposed to aggressive chemistries; therefore, the molded-in-cosmetics of the plastic are not affected, including color and texture
- Offers highly conductive surface with resistivity of 15-50 m-ohms/square
- Excellent EMI RFI shielding is attained, with 60-85 dB attenuation over frequencies from 30 MHz to 10 GHz
- ESD protection by utilizing the conductive coating to disperse the static charge
- Cybershield can produce selective plated parts up to 40 inches X 60 inches X 18 inches
- Plastic resins suitable for selective plating are:
- ABS
- Polycarbonate (PC)
- PC/ABS
- Consult Cybershield if your application requires resin outside this group or to discuss your application design requirements
All-Over Electroless Plating with nickel plating over copper plating is a highly cost effective and superior EMI RFI shielding system for plastic components.
- Offers EMI RFI shielding effectiveness in excess of 100 dB from 30 MHz to 10 GHz
- Cybershield has large scale, automated plating equipment to provide customers with the lowest cost solution
- Parts up to 60" x 40" x 18" can be plated on Cybershield electroless plating line or thousands of smaller parts can be plated en mass in large plating baskets to achieve lowest EMI RFI shielding coating available to designers.
The all-over plating process eliminates the autocatalytic base coat and plates directly onto the plastic components. Cybershield has extensive skill and experience in plating plastics with EMI RFI shielding and is successful in plating all plateable grades of plastic and even some grades that the resin manufacturers list as non-plateable.
Download more information about plating on plastics technology
In addition to EMI RFI shielding and ESD coating applications, All-Over Electroless Plating offers customers with a low cost alternative to plated metal components. Cybershield engineers can tailor the finish of the plated plastic to meet the current plated metal components often with savings in cost as well as weight.
Cybershield offers optional electroless plating coatings of Tin and Gold. There is a wide range of plateable plastic resins can be metallized with Cybershield processes for optimum EMI RFI shielding, including resins in the following families: