Filled Via Planarity

When plating through holes in a printed circuit board, sometimes vias are filled irregularly. The result is raised bumps along surface of board. There was a time where this was not a problem, but in the age of surface mount components, surface planarity is critical. This is because adjacent, low-profile components may be affected by the surplice of metal.

How can Accumet help with via filling?

Accumet is the pioneer in lapping and polishing ceramic substrates. It makes perfect sense that we are also very skilled at making filled vias co-planar with the surface of the substrate. We have the capability to reduce the via height, using our proprietary process. We rely on our decades of expertise to achieve flat and parallel surfaces by lapping, polishing, and inspecting substrates to extremely tight tolerances.

This post-metallization service is just one of the many highly skilled services that we offer our microelectronics customers. Our filled via planarity process can be done while customer-supplied material is already in-house being laser machined for a post-metallization process such as singulation or machining of cutouts. This is another example of how Accumet can offer our customers so much more than a typical “job shop". Our ability to assist our customers with multiple faucets of production provide real savings to our customers by reducing transit costs and production time. In addition to cost savings, we offer our customers peace of mind knowing that their product, already very expensive in terms of labor hours spent and cost of precious metals used, is being shipped to ONE vendor and handled by a company that has been doing this for almost 50 years!

As with all aspects of our business, we welcome and certainly encourage dialogue between our technical sales staff and our customers. We always recommend working collaboratively to ensure our processes are compatible with our customer’s processes to yield the best quality outcome. The initial surface finish spec is dependent upon what the final finished surface finish requirements are. Also, different materials process at different rates. Therefore, it is strongly recommended you partner with us before purchasing the raw substrates. This will ensure the highest quality product at the best price.

Additional processes to consider include:
• Spacing between vias
• Surface finish on material
• Filled Via height
• Final substrate thickness

We've been a trusted full service go to advanced manufacturing partner for many decades. Our engineering experts are always available to help bring designs to production with recommendations that are practical and economical. From prototyping to long-term design-for-manufacturability of your particular project, we support you every step of the way. Our mission is to deliver a quality product on a timely basis, and with that in mind, we encourage our engineering-driven customers to roll up their sleeves and with us to work through design, prototyping and long-term production repeatability challenges. Contact us with your application support questions at any time.