Board fingers are conductive patterns on circuit boards, often made with gold plating, that improve efficiency and signal processing. They can be recycled for use in other products and have replaced older, more complicated circuitry. Companies purchase and harvest the gold plating for reuse in manufacturing newer circuit boards.
Sometimes known as circuit board fingers, board fingers are the patterns used on circuit boards to carry signals across the boards. Often made with gold plating, the highly conductive nature of the fingers helps improve the efficiency of circuit boards. In addition to being highly efficient, it is not unusual for the gold content found in a board finger to eventually be collected for re-use as and when the circuit board begins to wear out.
The presence of a board finger on a circuit is important to the function of a circuit. This is because the finger acts as an edge connector where the connector plugs into sockets that help carry electronic current and signaling. The gold content found in a card’s finger plating helps improve this electrical flow, which in turn allows the card to process signals quickly and with little or no failure rate.
Considered a mainstay in electronics manufacturing today, the use of the board finger in creating circuit boards is common. Thanks to the inclusion of the finger design, many of the more complicated circuitry required in years past are no longer needed. When properly configured, a finger on the board can conduct an electrical signal in a way that is not only much more efficient than previous technology, but also allows devices that use these types of circuit boards to operate more economically.
As with any type of electronic component, a circuit will eventually experience sufficient wear and tear, which will require replacement. When this occurs there is often the strain of picking up the gold plating on the board finger. That way you can recycle that gold for use in other applications, rather than tapping into new resources to create those new boards or other products.
There are a number of companies that actively purchase and harvest the gold plating found on the board finger lines that appear on older circuit boards. It is not unusual for larger companies to make arrangements to sell their older boards to these recycling companies as a means of generating a small amount of revenue from the now replaced boards. In turn, the recycling company can mine the gold from the finger configuration of the board on any older circuit board and prepare the gold for use in manufacturing a wide range of products including newer circuit boards .
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