scope:

Abstract

For many years, conformal coatings used for high performance applications have been qualified to either the military standard for conformal coatings, MIL-I-46058, or the commercial equivalent, IPC-CC-830, which was almost identical to the military specification. Unfortunately, the military specification was declared "inactive for new designs" in 1995. While the Qualified Products List (QPL) has been maintained for this specification, the document itself has not been updated for technology since the 1990s. IPC-CC-830 was written to be the same (essentially) as MIL-I-46058, such that conformal coating vendors could do one set of testing that would meet the test requirements of both specifications. At the writing of this document, IPC-CC-830 is at Revision B, Amendment 1, and maintains the established relation to MIL-I-46058.

Conformal coatings, like many high-performance materials, have evolved considerably since the 1990s. New coatings, such as fluoropolymers or hybrid coatings, have come on the market, many of which offer superior protection characteristics, but do not fit into the existing classifications of either MIL-I-46058 or IPC-CC-830, making their acceptance into the high-performance community problematical.

In 2012, the IPC Conformal Coating Task Group (5-33a), who maintains the IPC-CC-830 specification, realizing that the military document was not going to change, began to discuss how to add new classes of coatings to the CC-830 specification, without eliminating the historical relationship to MIL-I-46058. The new classes will be added to IPC-CC-830, Revision C, or later revisions..

This white paper was written to explain some of the technical issues that came up with relation to new coating materials, the discussions held, and the decisions of the committee regarding how new materials would be incorporated into IPC-CC-830. It is hoped that with the revision of IPC-CC-830 to incorporate these new technologies, that the custodians of MIL-I-46058 would either cancel that outdated military specification in favor of CC-830 or allow IPC to lead a revision of the military document to bring it back into alignment with modern coating materials and processes.