I posted this to SED, but it's relevant here too and the noise is lower.
From 15th March, all UK producers, importers or resellers of electronic thingies have to register with a WEEE scheme. It appears that there's a minimum fee (
I had a look recently and did find some schemes with registration about half this figure.
Not exactly clear what you get for this.... yet another stealth tax funding pointless Eurocracy IMO.
In general, the least waste of money involves ceasing to offer your product to this market, thereby denying funding to the snouts-in-the- trough gang in Brussels.
...and also denying your family the food on the table?
Experience shows with several EC directives that some countries take them more literally than others. The competitive advantage goes to those who just ignore it (not mentioning any names ;-) The UK suffers from taking it seriously.
Regards, Richard.
Unfortunately, there are really only a few ways to deal with stupid local governments (and few are more stupid and local than the one in question):
a) bribe them b) blackmail them c) campaign to get them voted out, or d) move out of their sphere of influence
The Brussels gravy train is too huge for a) to be feasible (even Microsoft could not afford it), and b) has technical difficulties. c) isn't realistically achievable; the process is tainted to the core, so those particular weevils are more or less permanently ensconced in the boll.
That really only leaves d) - and one would hope that eventually the tax base would decrease to the point that their caviar and champagne lifestyle would implode.
I am absolutely disgusted with the whole RoHS/WEEE mess. The full scale of the disaster that Europe has handed the world will not be evident for a number of years, but, when it hits, it will be trully horrific. I simply can't understand how the electronics industry let it happen.
Remember the days of the Y2K madness? Most of it was unfounded. And, of course, where problems existed workarounds could be had.
Well, who wants to sign-up to fly in a passanger aircraft full of RoHS electronics? How do you know when copper erosion or tin wiskers are going to cause a catastrophic failure?
Don't say it can't happen...it is slowly becoming impossible to design with non-RoHS components.
A revolution of sorts is required to repeal all of this stuff and make it more sensible. It is OK to care for the environment (and, we must), however the approach that has been chosen is nothing less than insanity. Regretfully we know that nothing will be done about this until catastrophic failures start to be well documented as being caused by RoHS-related failure modes.
What a mess...
-Martin
An addendum to that.
As a manufacturer, what I'd really like to do is provide no warranty whatsoever within the European Union due to any RoHS-related failures. I shouldn't be responsible for failures due to a forced- down-your-throat process and technology that we KNOW is unreliable and plain dangerous in the long term.
The problem is that this would be tantamount to pulling out of the EU market because there's always someone willing to lie and cheat customers and tell them that everything is OK. So, our competitors will offer product and warranties, and we will have to as well. And in a few years, the lottery that RoHS reliability will become will start to affect all of us, manufacturers and end-users. How will that be good for the environment?
End of rant.
-Martin
There was a huge amount of work done prior to Jan 1, 2000 to detect and correct potential problems. I had been involved in systems for quite a few years, in which the failure would have made headline news, but at least I was fully confident in my original and Y2k checking work to go out partying in the streets that night.
I have no problem with that.
Any critical avionic or any critical industrial process is controlled by double/triple redundant systems. It is quite unlikely that all systems would fail during the same flight (even if the components are from the same batch). Of course, this requires a strict subsystem replacement policy and not fly if one system failed during the previous flight.
In the IT sector in the old days, SCSI disks were considered toys, but with the introduction of mirroring/RAID systems, even these low cost (at that time) drives became acceptable :-).
With the constantly dropping hardware prices and also dropping hardware reliability, much more systems are going to use some redundancy techniques to keep the system reliability at an acceptable level.
Paul
And this is exactly what you are expected to do. All of the so called eurocracy is just a means to take medium-small companies out of the market. Somethig similar happens with the american patent system.
Josep
Perhaps someone can explain to me why the use of different materials in components introduces a failure risk.
I can see that there is a (large) cost of compliance caused by having to validate all the new components, but in most technological sectors this is a natural process anyway.
Whilst I have no aero experience, I have recently worked (as a software engineer) in other safety critical areas, and the norm there now appears to be to use the latest, greatest, smallest, fastest, components available, rather than the "only use components with 20 years of historical testing" that the MOD mandated in 1979 (a slight exaggeration).
I can see that there might be a risk to using new components in a design, but ISTM that that risk is there anyway, why does the material that the component is made of introduce a risk?
thanks
tim
RICHARD, Please, please, please, please, Is definitively NOT a good idea to sign your message with the name of all the processor the members of the group can use.
When I search for a processor, the answer is alway YOUR message...
GRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRR
I can see how that could be annoying :-) I was under the impression that signature fields are not included in the search but am evidently wrong.
Regards, Richard.
FYI Check out 'tin whiskering' on a search engine for information - there is some controversy as to how significant this is - I would leave you to form your own opinion.
There are however two very real problems that I have come across in my work as an electronics engineer which do not seem to have been realised by most:
- a process which risks excessive heat destroying components, as well as flux being burned off thus still giving a poor joint.
Fortunately the DTI have issued guidance that any non-consumer electronic equipment where reliability is an issue is exempted. I therefore hope that the jumbo jets will still fly, and granny's pacemaker will not stop because of a dry joint!
-- Using Opera's revolutionary e-mail client: http://www.opera.com/mail/
You don't have any signature field. A sig is everything following the precise marker "-- ", including exactly the single space.
-- Chuck F (cbfalconer at maineline dot net) Available for consulting/temporary embedded and systems.
The problem is that a lot of components will cease to be available in non-RoHS form. All you have to do is go through the Digikey catalog and see that we are all engulfed in this RoHS frenzy. Whether we like it or not.
It might become increasingly expensive to specify a non-RoHS USB cable, for example. Or a non-RoHS USB transceiver chip. I know for a fact that there is at least one very large passenger aircraft still in design that uses such consumer/commodity technology.
Even if it doesn't go airborne. Think about computers and various other devices in mission-critical applications. While it might be nice to think that any equipment used in these sorts of applications is 150% screened, I am a lot more skeptical than that...because at the end of the day, it's a business and you win contracts by being the lowest bidder or darn near that.
There's already one report of a nuclear power plant having suffered a dangerous failure due to tin wiskers in lead-free solder. I'll have to search to find the link. Try "RoHS nuclear plant" as a search string.
-Martin
The most widely publicised failure is due to tin wisker growth. Imagine a large BGA chip with ball spacings in the order of 0.8 to
1mm. Now imagine tiny little tin wiskers growing over a period of time. And, now, imagine what happens when those wiskers make contact and create shorts across the device's I/O.Another problem is due to the chemestry actually attacking the copper traces and eroding them over time. You start to loose circuit paths, pad connections to traces, etc.
Yet another issue has to do with the fact that the new soldering compounds require higher soldering temperatures. This exposes all components to significantly greater thermal stress. We don't yet have history on how these components will fail.
A further effect of the higher process temperatures is that there are documented failures in the laminations of multi-layer PCB's. I recently read an article about this in Circuits Manufacturing magazine.
There's probably more...but I am not an expert and don't know what lies below the tip of this iceberg.
Remember that good RoHS reliability is highly dependant on process. If your CM's process isn't exactly right, you might have boards that will fail in a year or two and you don't know it. Nobody does.
I have personally experienced CM's that produced horrificly bad yields with fine pitch/BGA devices using conventional solders and process. And these are not garage operations. I shudder to think what could happen with their switch to RoHS profiles and manufacturing practices.
Maybe that's why I am so negative about the whole thing. In an ideal world there's the theoretical possibility that the RoHS process can result in high reliability boards.
We've messed with a known-good process for the wrong reasons. Who knows where this will lead.
If interested you can start to learn a little more about this here:
Let's put it this way: Swatch has refused to manufacture their watches in RoHS due to tin wiskers and other problem causing bad yields and reliability problems. If a watch maker won't make watches with this stuff, what are you willing to make with it? And, what level of warranty are you willing to issue to your customers?
-Martin
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