Nuts and Volts - December 2015

December 2015 65

Gold plated contacts are highly resistant to corrosion. If you are designing equipment that is going to potentially operate in humid environments or where reliability is paramount, then using sockets with gold plated contacts can be a good investment. For most applications, though, conventional machined pin sockets provide excellent performance and the added cost of gold plating will not buy you much.

Most consumer equipment uses inexpensive stamped pin sockets and even those are normally adequate.

#1 James Sweet via email

Depends on the environment that the project will be operating in. Gold plated sockets are usually specified for high reliability; that is, in mission-critical or life-critical applications. Tin plated contacts don’t like lots of high frequency vibration, such as near heavy industrial equipment. It also doesn’t tolerate humid environments.

Gold plating is great for use in humid environments, and is better than tin in high vibration environments.

There’s not a lot of difference in contact resistance, and you won’t gain anything with gold. If your project will be used in a humid or corrosive environment, then I suggest a conformal coating be applied over the entire circuit board. Gold plating comes with its own unique problems; the main one being separation of the gold plating from the plated surface causing a failed connection, or worse, an intermittent connection.

I’ve used tin plated sockets for many years, and never had a problem that could be traced to the sockets. My money is on the tin plated sockets.

#2 David Mason

Hazel Green, AL

I would get the less expensive tin sockets, unless you will have the project in a corrosive environment (and you would also have to deal with possible wire corrosion). In using many sockets over the years, I have not had any problems with tin. Get this “springy” side-contacting socket at www.digikey.com/product-detail/ en/A08-LC-TT/AE9986-ND/821740 rather than the machined pin type of socket. I have had some machined pin sockets make bad contact with the IC.

#3 Steven Barnicki Milwaukee, WI >>>YOUR ELECTRONICS QUESTIONS ANSWERED HERE BY N&V READERS

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