Pads finish
Standard tinned finish can be a bit uneven. Not an issue for lots of components, but can cause problems for some more specialist packages
Gold plated finish option is really good when dealing with BGA, LGA, etc packages, where you really want a perfectly flat high quality finish to ensure the BGA package will sit perfectly flat and solder without any potential rough surface issues.
Gold plating
Note that gold plating of copper is not the same as gold fingers for edge connectors. Standard PCB gold plating is soft, if you need gold plating of contacts for insertion and removal into connectors then you need a tougher gold finish on these pads.
Solder mask
Black soldermask is typically gloss black which is horrible don’t use it (mat black is nice)
USEFUL?
We benefit hugely from resources on the web so we decided we should try and give back some of our knowledge and resources to the community by opening up many of our company’s internal notes and libraries through mini sites like this. We hope you find the site helpful.
Please feel free to comment if you can add help to this page or point out issues and solutions you have found, but please note that we do not provide support on this site. If you need help with a problem please use one of the many online forums.