Plating / 'Growing Copper' on high resistance copper film board.

[CM800]

Hi All,

I've been steadily collecting parts to make a vacuum deposition chamber. I want to plate copper onto glass, ceramic and experiment with a few things along those lines.

Here is someone else's set up, a little similar to what I'm working to build.



I was wondering if anyone knew any good ways of growing a thin film copper layer (on the orders of ohms per cm) to a thicker layer, e.g. 1oz, 2 oz, 3oz.

[cdev]

Very cool!

[SeanB]

What is wrong with the old fashioned electroplating method, you can grow a nice thick film with it, and get it very smooth with the right amount of AC ripple on it as well.

[CM800]

What is wrong with the old fashioned electroplating method, you can grow a nice thick film with it, and get it very smooth with the right amount of AC ripple on it as well.

I suppose that makes sense. For some reason I was focusing on the method used to grow tracks AFTER etching the traces out. That still would be good to know however...

I want to try making some PCBs on exotic materials.

(Ceramics, Glass, Plastic?)

Could be interesting...

[technotronix]

Nice Video. Thanks for sharing video and keep us updated. Some of the other exotic material may include FR-4, Rogers, Nelco, and Megtron.

[T3sl4co1l]

There's a PCB house in Australia that makes their PCBs that way -- they advertise much better tolerances than conventional (foil base) methods, especially for heavy platings.

Tim

[Kean]

You can do electroless copper plating to start, but to build up thicker layers seems to require electroplating.

http://www.eurocircuits.com/Electroless-copper-deposition

[IconicPCB]

T3sl4co1l,

Yes I visited their shop many years ago ( late eighties early nineties ).

They had a vacuum deposition process with an RF bottle whereby a plasma /gas combination would be used to etch the substrate and then copper vapour deposition would occur.
Thin atomic layer of copper would then be pattern plated.
Protection would then be removed and the remaining hitherto protected atomic thickness layer would be etched away with minimal removal of wanted pattern copper.
Great outcomes.

They are one of a couple of shops left alive after 2000 Asian money market crash and subsequent migration to Asia.