The Electronics Source Book
October 19, 2005
For the past two years, the electronics industry has scrambled to move its component products to RoHS compliance. The hand wringing has mostly been about whether companies can become green by the July 1, 2006 deadline. But recently, there’s been a call in the opposite direction. As increasing numbers of suppliers announce the release of lead-free components, one segment of the industry is screaming, “Please halt!”
The defense industry, part of the medical equipment industry, and portions of telecom are exempt from RoHS requirements. While telecom and perhaps the medical equipment industry will eventually have to go green, the defense industry’s exemption is ongoing. When you have a satellite that has to function for years in a stressful environment, reliability trumps environmental cleanliness as the core value.
A task force created by the International Electronics Manufacturing Initiative (iNEMI) has called for component suppliers to safeguard the dependability of high-reliability products. The task force is specifically asking for the continued availability of tin-lead components for exempted products. “The iNEMI High-Reliability Task Force consists of OEMs and EMS providers whose products are characterized by long service life and high reliability requirements,” says Jim McElroy, CEO of iNEMI. “Maintaining high product reliability is absolutely critical to these companies’ survival. They are very concerned about the transition to lead-free and have banded together to provide a unified voice and message to the supply chain.”
The problem is, many of those in the exempt industries have not been buying high-reliability components. They’ve been buying commercial, commodity-like components in order to take the savings. The suppliers making commercial parts will likely phase out their leaded versions, since the demand for leaded components will fall to niche-market status. High-reliability products have always been a niche market, and those parts will probably continue through production. Yet since much of the defense industry has been buying commercial parts and their bill of materials calls for those commercial parts, switching to high-reliability parts now will incur the additional expense of system redesign as well as the high cost of specialty-market high-reliability parts.
Right now there’s a bit of confusion in the components market as many of the commercial component producers insisting they plan to produce both lead-free and leaded parts. “I’ve seen a number of component manufacturers advertise they’re going to carry leaded versions of the components as well as the lead-free versions,” says Jerry Czerwonka. “But if there is not money to be made, they won’t be able to afford to carry leaded products.”
Czerwonka believes this problem will eventually solve itself as component manufacturers improve the quality and reliability of their lead-free components. “In the beginning of the move to lead-free components, a lot of suppliers were talking about pure tin finishes because that was the best economy, but if you use pure tin there’s a concern about whiskering,” says Czerwonka. “Now the industry is moving to ‘tin over nickel’ and other techniques.”
Czerwonka believes that reliability problems with lead-free components will be a temporary concern since the reliability issues arose from the industry’s quick shift to lead-free. He notes that many component suppliers rushed to compliance and didn’t have the time to test a variety of solutions beyond pure tin. But that should change as companies compete to produce components that are both compliant and reliable.
Texas Instruments is a good example. The company recently announced it has added gold to its nickel-palladium finish. TI believes this move will end any possibility of whiskering. To back that up, the company is doing extensive testing. Not all component suppliers are as diligent as TI, and not all manufacturers have TI’s lengthy history of working on green parts. TI has been working on developing environmentally friendly components for more than ten years so it’s reasonable to expect other suppliers will dig in to solve any reliability issues with lead-free components.
Czerwonka believes the component industry will follow in TI’s footsteps to improve the reliability of lead-free components and resolve the need for leaded products. “At the end of the day, the component manufacturers are going to fix their reliability,” says Czerwonka. “The military end users put themselves in a Catch-22 when they went to commercial parts, but the light at the end of the tunnel is reliable lead-free parts.”
1.
Green laws
hitting from all corners
2.
iNEMI
releases standards for RoHS transition
3.
Getting parts
around the world
4. Global logistics: every part to its right place
5.
Environmental
regulations become patchwork nightmare
6.
Finding leaded
parts after the RoHS deadline
7.
What happens
to leaded parts after RoHS
8.
Engineering
jobs are migrating globally
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