Colorful Life with Colorful Soldermask
Green solder mask has long been the industry standard color. However, the solder mask color starts to change someday. Today there are a variety of commercially available colors for soldermask. There is a growing use of colors other than green in the past several years, primarily driven by assemblers.
Here are some reasons for using different colors.
1) The more practical reason of using different colors is to provide a highly visible indicator of revision changes to please the end-users.
2) The light reflectance, absorbance or transmission properties will have an influence on assembly equipment. Applications can also generate a requirement for a color other than green in order to produce the desired contrast or brightness.
3) Alternative colors have a great impact on identifying lead-free assemblies, helping to avoid mistakes in a mixed-assembly environment.
The solder mask color has no effect on the performance of the PCB itself. However, the difference between the colors is the resolution of the board will be different. Colors like red and blue match the green PCB in resolution. Black and yellow solder masks however have significantly less resolution than green and the clear solder masks have greater resolutions.
Soldermask Color
Along with the general green, there are other colors such as red, blue, yellow, white and black available. If you require an alternative color, most of the manufacturers will charge for extra cost. But in ALLPCB.com, we will charge at no extra cost for most of PCBs.
