ROHS status

I wonder how many are treating rohs like CE...... a joke and waste of time?

Heaven forbid, disregarding EU directkivs, how anti-social :-)

martin

At a meeting in Oxford, England, I asked my customers if the pulse generator that I proposed to supply would have to be CE compliant. They about fell over laughing. One them took pity and explained that CE means Can't Enforce.

John

How much did is on the parts?

Suppose you use old tin-lead solder paste on a board with SMT parts that have tin plated legs? Will the solder mix with the plating and result in a slightly higher tin content in the final solder?

What about BGAs that actually have "solder" balls rather than thin plating?

On Mon, 23 Oct 2006 21:56:21 -0500, Hal Murray wrote in Msg.

That's what I thought, too. But customers aren't interested in what they actually end up with in reality, they just see that some of the components had minute amounts of "pure tin" on them at one time, which sets off all kinds of alarm bells.

Don't tell them that conventional solder is made by adding, my gosh, lead, copper, and a few other things to "pure tin".

Seriously, I can't seen any mechanism for whisker growth on tin-plated stuff that's been reflowed or even wave soldered with SnPb solder.

robert

John, there are those products that are exempt and others that are not. And there are companies that also export out of the EU.

Rene

I almost completely distrust the catalog distributors with respect to how they know if what they sell is ROHS-compliant or not. Sure, they came up with some hokey part numbers, but what do those have to do with reality? The manufacturer you hope knows for sure, the customer might want to know (but often just plain doesn't care), but the middlemen, they seem to be figuring out how to profit most from the deal and nothing else.

For example, one US distributor I found to have different part numbers for ROHS-compliant nylon spacers vs non-ROHS-compliant nylon spacers.

Tim.

So what. Isn't this pb free nylon after all? Here, we have a maker of cholesterol free orange juice.

I'd prefer some more challenging statement like rubbish free marketing or such but we all know this to be impossible. Maybe the market droids are the end of the food chain WRT Pb concentration.

It's not uncommon for plastics to have lead or other toxic additives. They're added as internal or external lubricants, heat or UV stabilizers, fire retardants, or for other reasons (by contrast most fillers and reinforcing additives, and most pigments and dyes are fairly benign stuff). There's very little chemically pure plastic resin in use in real applications.

If you believe the below, Bivar apparently had some part numbers that may have contained more than 0.1% lead (see the asterisk on page 1), but they seem to be gone.

I would have thought some other toxic stuff would be more likely in nylon (polyamide), maybe a polybrominated (PBDE) fire retardant additive. They're switching to supposedly safer stuff like antimony trioxide.

I believe this kind of additive is also restricted under the RoHS legislation.

Best regards, Spehro Pefhany

If the SnPb solder wicks up and covers all the tin plating which I don't think it typically does.

I see today's tiny packages with tiny lead spacing much more prone to failure if whiskers do grow. The whiskers in that photograph are long enough to short pins on many modern packages.

I am surprised those whiskers only took about a year to grow, maybe we won't have to wait so long to see how much unreliability lead free is building into our electronics.

Thanks for reminding me. At one point I knew about that... but I think that was before they took the list of common plastic additives out of the CRC tables or something. (After they took it out, I forgot it!)

Tim.

"Want some fat-free, lactose-free, sugar-free, cholesterol-free yogurt?"

"You mean, mold?"

Cheers! Rich

Unless you get them on your clothes. The stuff _never_ comes out! ;-)

Cheers! Rich

Two diffeent part numbers make sense. How else can you tell them apart. RoHS is more than lead free. It also affects plastic parts. The normal parts are soldered together with tin melting at 188Degrees, while the lead free melts at 217 degres. There are numerous plastics that become soft at the elevated temperature of lead free solder. So the RoHS parts are special in that sense that they are also compatible with the new processes.

Rene

BGA devices can be a REAL problem (I don't use them luckily). My opinion is that it (no pure tin) is not a big deal. As you say the tin-lead solder will alloy w the pure tin and eliminate most of the problem. Reports I have seen have said that the termination next to the body where the tin-lead solder does not cover the original pure tin can be a cause of whiskers: I am not sure that it is that big a deal But I have to go with the letter of the contract: if it says "No Pure Tin" then that is what we do.

M Walter

Look for an adder to the vendor PN, like a '#" or a "+" to indicate RoHS compliant

M Walter

That pretty much answers it. Thanks.

robert