Kyowa Electric Wire Supplies New Pb-free Plating Strips for Pins

Kyowa Electric Wire, Osaka based electric cable manufacturer of Furukawa Electric Group, announced on Tuesday the firm developed new lead-free electroplating for connector and electronic part pins, “NU Series.” NU Series is a metal strip with double electroplating layers which represents high solderability and prevents tin whisker generation. Kyowa Electric Wire plans to start NU Series sales this autumn and aims 100 million yen revenue for an initial year. The firm especially targets automobile related applications.A manufacturing process of NU Series is: making a base metal layer on a metal strip such as copper or stainless steel, electroplating a tin layer on the base layer, coating the strip with low melting point metal, and completing the product by a reflow process.Electroplated strips are used as pin materials for connectors and electronic parts. The pins are soldered with printed circuit boards. NU Series pins represent 20-30% higher soldering speed and height compared with normal tin plated pins. Additionally NU Series enables less generation of tin whisker, which is a needle-like metallic crystal generating on a tin plating surface and causes short out troubles.Kyowa Electric Wire will start commercial production of NU Series strips at Fukui plant in Fukui Prefecture, Japan. The firm plans to increase plating tanks and reflow furnaces at Fukui plant after acquiring customers’ product evaluations and quality approvals for NU Series. The demand is expected to grow up especially from automobile industry, where lead-free trend has not penetrated yet.