Engineered Reliability – Safeguarding electrical components and devices with nanocoating technology
Purpose
With humidity, chemicals, corrosives, and more threatening the circuitry of today’s connected devices, the reliability of product use is at risk. As companies continue to utilize electronics to increase productivity, data collection, and ensure repeatability in a variety of processes and applications, protecting these suites of products from the surrounding environment becomes more and more crucial.
Results
Thin film nanocoatings can protect critical electronic circuitry that is used throughout a variety of applications and can be a powerful solution to implement to ensure reliability. Only requiring nanometers to microns-thin coating, plasma enhanced nanocoatings are dense, highly cross-linked, multi-layer films that create a physical and chemical barrier around components to enable an envelope around the circuitry at a molecular level. The result is dependable functionality in harsh environments that may include moisture, sweat, etc. Plasma enhanced nanocoatings leverage various liquids and gas chemistries to provide fast deposition cycles that are repeatable and scalable to projects of different sizes, use environments, and performance standards.
Outcome
Every connected electronic has a unique set of parameters that should be recognized and evaluated to confirm that conformal coating solutions are customized to the application and desired functionality. Whether it’s a specific engineering design, manufacturing limitation, or cost requirement, significant considerations are analyzed before a coating ever reaches an end-product. There is a vast amount of data present regarding conformal coatings and plasma enhanced nanocoatings specifically, however fitting the data to an intended purpose can be a very time intensive and challenging process. In this presentation, we will focus on real world examples of where significant product challenges were presented (such as humidity, temperature, or corrosion) and the investment of time and resources focused on device dependability and functional testing. Data analysis from industry standard testing methodologies as well as application specific approaches will be presented to demonstrate that nanocoating solutions ultimately provide the protection required for challenging end use environments encountered during everyday operation.