Elsyca Intellitool Matrix plating project.

The idea of making pooling panels was not new in 1993. On the Benelux market a dutch company was already successfully offering single sided boards in pooling since the eighties of the last century. For double sided boards however it was not that common yet.

When we introduced combination panels for double sided boards in our own production in Hungary there was a lot of resistance from the operators and from the production management. They saw the complexity of their job increase, and technological challenges had to be taken care of.

Now, almost 20 years later, most technology issues have been taken care of, except for one major area, the galvanic copper plating.

For this galvanic process, the design of the PCB plays a vital role in the outcome of the process. In pooling panels there is even an influence of the design of one board on the copper deposition on surrounding designs. That means that we have to be very careful how to build our panel layouts.

The restrictions in panel configuration create limitations that affect the efficiency in our production. As a producer you can look at this problem in two ways:

• Focus on efficiency and accept uneven copper distribution. Also accept that the quality of the PCB's produced for one customer can be influenced by the design of another pcb on the same pooling panel.
• Focus on quality - stick to an even distribution and minimum copper plating thickness all over the panel. Accept that part of the panel surface gets lost because of extra copper areas and spacing introduced to balance out the galvanic layer. Also accept that not all jobs can be pooled with acceptable plating results.