Altera RoHS Irony

Today I got this in Altera's email newsletter

Get RoHS Compliant with Altera FPGAs, CPLDs and Structured ASICs

I have never seen a single 3000 series PLD available in leadfree that you could actually purchase for delivery from stock. I have been able to buy lead versions of most of this family without too much trouble.

I managed to buy a small number of leadfree Max II parts that are on allocation.

I think the current delivery is something like 14 weeks (about when we are all supposed to be RoHS compliant).

I guess I found this ad a bit ironic since we have all known that RoHS was coming for a long time and Altera is bragging in their ads that they have been shipping RoHS compliant devices for a long time. I guess this must not include their distributors......

I hate the RoHS requirements, but like nearly everyone else, we are working to comply. It doesn't help when the manufacturers are at least a year late in the transition process.

Thanks for listening to my rant.....

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Al Clark
Danville Signal Processing, Inc.
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Al Clark
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Think this is bad - just wait for the stock write-downs, as massive inventories of Lead based parts suddenly go past a 'use by' date...

-jg

Reply to
Jim Granville

Anyone familiar with the reasoning behind the lead restrictions? There hasn't been any publicity excepting the compounds that are poison when eaten and those that are poison in the blood stream. Are there others?

Hul

Al Clark wrote:

Reply to
Hul Tytus

I'm not sure what you mean. Lead is a heavy metal that causes many problems including permanent damage to the central nervous system. That is why lead is no longer in gasoline or paint. The lead in electronics ends up in landfills which at some point will end up in our water and food chain. Yes, we take great "precautions" to keep landfills intact and away from our water sources, but they all leak and some leak a lot. Eventually they will all be sources of significant contamination of our environment if they contain long term polutants like lead.

That is it in a nutshell. If we continue to concentrate dangerous polutants by putting them in products and then bury them in our back yards, we will never have an even remotely clean environment.

Hul Tytus wrote:

Reply to
rickman

It's also worth pointing out that although people use the term "lead free", that's only a part of RoHS and similar directives. There are a number of other metals and chemicals banned or limited by RoHS which are more poisonous than lead, although they are lower volumes in electronics.

The theory is nice - it's a step towards being a bit more environmentally friendly. The implementation is a lot more questionable "let's set some rules, and a deadline with plenty of time, and 'market forces' will find a solution". It would have been far better to have graduated commercial incentives - start with grants for companies willing to switch over early as "prototypes" for the industry, and then move to gradually increasing taxes on leaded components and electronics until everyone has switched over.

Reply to
David Brown

I agree that it would have been better to phase in the process, but that would still have been painful and a LOT more work to manage.

Reply to
rickman

"rickman" wrote in news: snipped-for-privacy@f14g2000cwb.googlegroups.com:

I think the biggest problem with the mandates is that it mostly and all or nothing proposition. If the board didn't use lead solder, this would reduce most of the lead content on a typical board. It would be very easy to make a board that reduces its lead content by 90% without much impact on existing inventories and designs.

The biggest problem is caused by the few parts that are not readily available (in theory or otherwise) that cause the board to be almost but not quite RoHS compliant. I brought up the Altera parts as an example since many of the people in this group might have exactly the same problem. If I use an Altera PLD which I have (and can still buy), that is not leadfree, my board will not be RoHS compliant.

I also wonder what they expect us to do with all of our inventory. The big problem is that the manufacturers of the parts needed to be completely RoHS compliant at least a year or maybe even two years ago, so that the distributors could turn their stock and then endusers like most of us could turn our stock. I was seeing passives that were still non RoHS as late as Fall 2005. In some cases, I use one resistor of a reel per run. It takes a long time to burn 5000 parts for some of us.

I had a connector manuafacturer tell me that the 5 cent connector I buy from them is not RoHS but that I could get it RoHS if I bought 20000 pieces. I use about 3000/year.

Sometimes, I think that the Europeans think that all products are like consumer items that have a product life of a few months or maybe a year (like a PC or cell phone). I have already seen many products being redesigned simply because a key part will not be available in a RoHS compliant package (and would have been otherwise). The manufacturer decides that the part volume isn't worth the effort to modify so they kill it instead.

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Al Clark
Danville Signal Processing, Inc.
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Reply to
Al Clark

Al,

Please don't tarr us all with the European 'politician's brush, they just _don't_ think.

A couple of weeks ago someone on sci.electronics.design (I think) posted a link to a presentation that quoted TI's figures, that a worldwide conversion to lead free packages would save about the same amount of lead as in TEN car batteries.

The european parliament is a complete waste of time and a huge waste of money.

Nial.

Reply to
Nial Stewart

"Nial Stewart" wrote in news: snipped-for-privacy@individual.net:

Fair enough, We sell our products to many European companies, both small and large. I sure many EU based companies are struggling with these same issues.

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Al Clark
Danville Signal Processing, Inc.
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Reply to
Al Clark

It's even worse. The political people that decided to go for the RoHs rules made it even worse. In order to avoid the lead, you have to poison the environment more, because you need a substitute for lead and the separation process for lead needs more energy and more critical process steps.

In the end, we have no lead, but many new problems. That's the way it works if you ask the political guys to do something ... ... and there is more to come in that direction ...

BTW some industries have a permission for not being RoHs compliant. For example Cars, Trains, Medicine, Aircrafts etc.

All the areas where a lot of lead is being used these days.

At the end we end up with more legal rules and no real advantage of having to follow these rules ...

"This is just another brick in the wall" to lower our competition, in the global market ... really nice time to come ..."

Also these guys do not have a clear answer on : "What has to be done for all the situations where a 100 % RoHs transition is just not possible, because the parts are not available.

But as in most cases these 'stupid' and 'boring' real life details do not really interest the political guys. Ha ...

Markus

Reply to
Markus Meng

I'll refrain from commenting on the environmental merit of lead-free devices.

I did a quick check of inventory on a representative distributor (Arrow Electronics North America) web site. Most MAX 3000A and Cyclone devices (picking 2 representative product families) have similar lead-times for both leaded and lead-free (RoHS compliant) versions. Altera's minimum order quantities are the same for both devices. We have put in place a rigorous (though clearly not perfect) plan to facitate the transition to lead-free product. This is severely complicated by the fact that not all customers have interest in immediately converting all devices to lead-free product, which generally has a different manufacturing flow. As a result we need both leaded and lead-free ordering codes for most devices and most of these lead-free ordering codes have been in place for several quarters.

You can find a complete listing of Altera's lead-free solutions at

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Dave Greenfield Altera Marketing

Reply to
Dave Greenfield

"Dave Greenfield" wrote in news: snipped-for-privacy@o13g2000cwo.googlegroups.com:

Thanks for responding Dave.

I asked Arrow to place lead free parts from Altera in a bond. They came back and told us these were "GS", guaranteed stock. At the time, which was only a few months ago, they had lots of lead parts and no lead free parts in the 3000 family.

Arrow now shows very long lead times for all versions. Max II parts are on allocation and I can't get these placed in my bond, but I managed to buy a small quantity.

DigiKey, another Altera distributor shows only lead versions and treats lead free versions as Non-Stock items. My guess is that they didn't want to sell both types and wanted to make sure that they had gotten rid of all the lead inventory first.

In my view, very few customers are going to want to stop selling to the EU. I realize that there are exceptions to the mandates and that some customers really don't care. Generally a lead free part works just fine with a lead solder process (except BGAs since the profile needs to be different).

My rant started because as a supplier of single source parts, you need to insure reasonable deliveries. At the moment, you aren't promising parts before June. At the same time, your promotional material is bragging that you are committed to RoHS parts that have never been readily available to my knowledge. Maybe you just underestimated the demand, problems in the distribution channel or difficulties with process changes. I know that Altera is not alone with this problem, its the irony of the ad that set me off....

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Al Clark
Danville Signal Processing, Inc.
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Reply to
Al Clark

I don't think you are going to see leaded parts going away just because the EU requires lead free parts. I work for a company that gets a lot of attention from distributors and manufacturers and they have assured us that lead based parts will be around for a long time. There are just too many designs that are not going to change even if they can't be sold in the EU.

In general, not many are interested in taking chances with their process. There is no shortage of lead parts and there are lots of customers outside the EU. Although many will want to convert their manufacturing right away, there are many who don't want to be on the bleeding edge. They will wait out the transition and adopt the new processes only after they are fully proven. One thing I keep hearing about is how the lead free solder is brittle. I don't know if this is true, but mechanical failure is just as bad and electrical failure of a part.

Reply to
rickman

Can you clarify which ones actually _have_ lead, as opposed to not being RoHS complaint ( which includes other materials too ).

ie I thought that gull wing packages like TQFP and PQFP, as well as MLF packages, resistors, caps, are already tin or nickel plated, and have been for a while ?

BGA packages, I CAN understand, as they use Solder Balls, so those you would want to match to your paste...

-jg

Reply to
Jim Granville

The RoHS rules have holes large enough to drive the entire EU parliament through (while drinking)

One notable 'exempt' industry is automotive, so expect the automotive parts to not necessarily change - indeed TI has separated it's automotive catalog from it's other offerings already. As automotive accounts for a rather large percentage of small electronics devices, that exemption alone renders most of RoHS farcical. If the intent is to protect consumers, then perhaps it's a good idea, but the fact of the matter is it is more expensive to manufacture completely RoHS boards (I know, I design them and get the quotes from contract manufacturers). The consumer market being what it is, it will mean either a lower profit margin (the consumer market is notoriously price sensitive) or products simply not being offered on consumer scales.

Just my take

Cheers

PeteS

Reply to
PeteS

Hi Al, If you check an European distributor for Altera like EBV

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you should see that they do have a fair amount of lead-free inventory of Altera. So it inculdes their distis. I think this campain is more for the European market since we need to go over to the RoHS side now. In US only the companies that sell products into Europe has to comply with their products (AFAIK). That might explain Arrows lack of stocking in NA.=20 Just my 0,02=80 Fredrik

Reply to
Fredrik

Jim Granville wrote in news: snipped-for-privacy@clear.net.nz:

You have to check with each mfr. Some have new numbers, some don't. Altera places an 'N" at the end of their part number. Lots of passives, QFPs, etc use lead solder plating

Its important to pay attention to BGAs because the balls are solder. If they are lead free, they melt at a higher temperature than lead-tin solder.

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Al Clark
Danville Signal Processing, Inc.
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Reply to
Al Clark

Gentlemen,

May I remind you that that the leadfree, RoHS and Green stuff started in Japan, not in Europe. Europe adopted to this Japanes initiative, and only the US seems to have problems. I think the problem is that US just waited to long to start investigating how to implement.

Luc

Reply to
Luc

For most component packages, there should not be a problem with providing only lead-free versions - some manufacturers (TI, IIRC) have been doing that for years. BGA packages are a different matter, of course, as lead-free solder balls need higher temperatures. So I suppose it's more of a problem for a company like Altera than most manufacturers, since a higher proportion of your chips are BGA.

Perhaps Intel's copper pillar packaging would be a good choice in the future? (Not that I know anything about it other than the name...)

Reply to
David Brown

You may and I have heard the claim before, but when I look I find no evidence that is it true.

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nospam

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