Sustainable Production Process for High-Quality Gold-Plated Wires for Antennae - Gold-PAWS

Project summary

Electroplating technology suffers from limited sustainability, due to its wide-spread reliability on wet chemical processes, toxic materials, and high consumptions of energy. The proposed project aims to improve both the sustainability of the plating process of ultra-thin wires and the coating performance, by establishing the first ever reel-to-reel, environmentally friendly and dry coating process for ultra-thin wires, based on the combination of a physical vapour deposition (PVD) process and an ion beam implantation post-treatment. The resulting superiority in sustainability will be demonstrated with reference to defined sustainability criteria and benchmarks, whilst the quality improvement of the resulting gold-plated wires will enable an estimated increase in turnover by 20 MSEK (i.e. 40%) between 2024 and 2027 at LUMA, while IONICS will be able commercialise its platform technology in entirely new market sectors, and MANO will widen its R&I service to a new set of clients.