Deposition of Diamond Coatings on Ultrathin Microdrills for PCB Board Drilling

The drilling of State-of-the-Art printed circuit boards (PCBs) often leads to shortened tool lifetime and low drilling accuracy due to improved strength of the PCB composites with nanofillers and higher thickness-to-hole diameter ratio. Diamond coatings have been employed to improve the tool lifetime and drilling accuracy, but the coated microdrills are brittle and suffer from coating delamination. To date, it is still difficult to deposit diamonds on ultrathin microdrills with diameters lower than 0.2 mm. To avoid tool failure, the pretreatment was optimized to afford sufficient fracture strength and enough removal of cobalt. Further, the adhesion of the diamond coating was improved by employing an interlayer comprising SiC/microcrystalline diamond, which mitigates stress accumulation at the interface. By these means, microdrills with diameters of 0.8 and 0.125 mm were coated with adherent diamonds. In this context, the composite coating with the diamond/SiC interlayer and a nanodiamond top layer featured enhanced adhesion compared to single nano- or microdiamond coatings on the WC-Co microdrills. The composite diamond-coated WC-Co microdrills featured improved wear resistance, resistance to delamination of the diamond coating, and improved performance for drilling PCBs compared to micro- and nanodiamond-coated microdrills without interlayer. In addition, a higher hole quality was achieved when the diamond-coated microdrills were used. These results signify that the composite/nanodiamond coating features the highest bonding strength and best drilling performance.