Monitoring quality of Au/Pd coatings in the nm range on printed circuit boards

As the electronics industry makes use of ever thinner coatings, manufacturers increase their demands on measuring technologies to provide reliable parameters for product monitoring. One example is the Au/Pd/Ni/Cu/printed circuit board system with coating thicknesses for Au and Pd of just a few nm. For monitoring the quality of these coating systems, X-ray fluorescence instruments have established themselves as the measurement method of choice.