Innovative plated crimping solutions for connectors in the automotive industry!

RoHS rules have driven innovative electroplating crimping solutions and removed tin and lead from terminal plating and board mounting, and when the European Union adopted Hazardous Substances Reduction (RoHS) rules on lead in 2003, the connector industry needed to find new ways to deliver products and solutions that could meet customer requirements, which was a particular challenge for the automotive connector industry.

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Consideration of innovative electroplating crimping solutions for automotive connectors One of the challenges is the increase in tin whiskers caused by adoption of lead-free materials, these tiny fragments from electronic contact pins pose a real problem of increased risk of electronic short circuits, making the automotive connector industry facing special crimping challenges. As automakers put more electronics, connectors, and sensors into vehicles at increasing densities, a single tin whisker can pose a real risk of conducting electricity across unrelated systems and can easily lead to costly and damaging product failures or recalls. An innovative electroplated crimp solution for the automotive industry is electroplated press-fit pins, press-fit pins provide solderless (i.e., lead-free) terminal-to-PCB connections that are proven adequate for harsh environmental automotive applications and can be used in header and single-pin solutions. Metallurgists at major majority connector companies have also designed new technologies to coat these pins with lead-free materials instead of traditional tin/lead (SnPb) or 100% tin (Sn) plating materials. Now plating pins using tinless bismuth (Bi) compounds, this new process called LITESURF plating reduces whisker risk by more than 1600 times and provides an ideal product for automotive applications, including airbag control units, anti-lock braking systems, electronic stability control systems, sensor systems and engine management systems. Innovative plating crimp solutions provide many advantages for automotive connectors to eliminate solder from the termination process, it can significantly reduce the thermal stress of connectors even before the system hits the road, reduce the overall use of hazardous substances, provide customers with better process control, and eliminate the soldering errors of the past few years, such as flux residue and cold solder spots. But with multiple plating and underplating options for automotive connector crimp pins, many materials and plating processes still face tin whisker challenges, bismuth-based plating offers a similar material deposition to tin but far less risky than whisker and is an affordable, non-toxic metal that is critical for its long-term acceptance and application in electronic systems.

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