Abstract
There has been an intensive effort in the industries in recent years to replace leaded solder with lead-free process in order to minimize the emission of toxic materials. However, leaded solder is still used in many cases where no alternative lead-free process is currently available. Leaded soldering of the wire terminals is one of the worst examples as it causes cross contamination of lead into the lead-free solder bath during the successive process. To avoid this problem, it is important to develop a new process of successfully removing polymer film coated on a copper wire. We have investigated the use of atmospheric pressure plasma as a solution for the polymer removal in conjunction with lead-free solder plating. The atmospheric plasma technology has some unique advantages compared with the conventional low pressure plasma processes such as low cost operation and high speed processing as the chemical reaction tends to be more enhanced at higher pressure. An atmospheric micro-plasma source was thus developed for this purpose and its high etching rate of more than 100 μm/min with fluorine gas mixture was demonstrated. Furthermore, it was found that the copper wires processed by this plasma could be readily plated with lead-free solder at low temperature of 250°C without any use of fluxes even at 168 h after removing the polymer film.
