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
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