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Unintended plates holes | Caused by laser cutting?
648 1 Sep 02.2019, 17:03:22

Hi!
This is not a question, but simply an interesting discovery I made.
Maybe someone encountered similar things or are interested in a discussion.
I ordered my PCBs from a PCB manufacturer. The PCBs are daughterboards and had to include a clearance hole for a rotary encoder on the board below.
I added a decent amount of pullback to the ground planes.

But still, the holes got plated.

It seems to use laser cutting instead of milling for holes and probably slots as well. This can be seen at the hole edges, as they are burnt as laser cut edges are:

When I remember correctly, to plate through holes intendedly PCB manufacturers use a conductive inc and cote the inside of the holes with it to be able to do electroplating as the next step.
Now my PCBs make the impression that the carbonization by the laser may have encouraged copper deposition during the plating process.
While writing this post I realise that this may become an issue if you are not careful enough during design stage and / or the pullback around holes it not big enough.
Here is one of the holes partially plated, you can see a nice little nick in the plating

I personally don't care, in my case it just makes the PCB look a bit more polished and beautiful 
Can you imagine cases in which this can become a serious issue?
Do you agree with my analysis or do you have any other thoughts on this?

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A****min

Sep 03.2019, 17:13:18

 

Plated holes are drilled early in the process, while non-plated ones are usually drilled near the end.  So normally you would provide different NC drill files for the plated and non-plated holes.  Or if the hole is reasonably large (like your one is) then it can be milled and included in the milling or dimension layer.
Usually the fab staff will notice the ground plane pullback and realise that certain holes are meant for mounting and should be non-plated, but if you really care you need to specify it.

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