tungsten

That's pure BS. If you lie about some of these certs and are caught, you go to jail. *I* care about that.

I think so. A form needs to be filled out and filed somewhere, and then they are happy. Or at least satisfied, happiness not being in great supply at MegaCorp.

Depends on the size of the outfit you work for. Smaller folks who buy parts from distributors often can't get the parts makers to respond to queries of that sort. What do they do, go out of business?

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

Tungsten (aka Wolfram, chemical symbol W) is used for metalization in semiconductor processing. Of course quantities are minute:

WHy is your guy upset about W? I think we get most of it from China. There are metals with much trickier supply chains (tantalum, etc)

I certainly don't know about all certs but isn't most of this stuff on DigiKey? If not there, most is on the manufacturer's web site. If you can't come up with it, you have to assume it doesn't comply, right?

I told them I didn't provide those certs. Will I go out of business?

Check; almost no disty will respond to the standardized query, and manufacturers will in essence refuse to respond because you do not $$$$pend big bux. So do a BOE estimate on quantities of each "restricted" element or compound and *carefully* determine that usage is less than the specified (large) tonnes per year and just say "compliant"; no cert fishing required.

Wrong assumption. If you cannot find a cert on a manufacturer's web site, the ONLY thing you then know is the manufacturer does not post a cert. There is no requirement that a manufacturer do such postings.

Tungsten is also produced by the DRC, same as tantalum.

Anyway, as I think I posted earlier there is a statutory requirement under Dodd-Frank for US public corporations to report on their use of 'conflict minerals'.

So, they gotta ask- tungsten, gold, tantalum and tin are on the list.

Here's some good bedtime reading- the Journal of Accountancy..

"An estimated 6,000 U.S. public companies will be directly affected by the SEC?s new conflict minerals regulation. Cost estimates for initial compliance range from $3 billion to $4 billion, as companies and their suppliers will have to trace the origins of gold, tantalum, tin, and tungsten that they are supplying to manufacturers who must comply with the SEC rule."

I imagine that SEC estimate does not include all the non-public-company suppliers who are pestered by the public companies for chain of custody and certification paperwork.

Just for comparison- exports (including non-conflict exports) from DRC of tungsten were running around $2m/month in 2013. Tantalum about $15m/month and tin about 4.5m/month.

--sp

I found no information at Digikey or any other disti on these two CoCs and the only info I did find was from the regulatory body and companies involved in training. At this point it is clearly not an issue being addressed by the electronics industry, so I'm pretty sure I can ignore it. Likely this is spillover from regulation intended for other substances.

You really should learn to think. If you're too small for the manufacturer to bother with and the information isn't available on DigiKey (or similar) of from the manufacturer's site, you have to assume it has no cert, and move on.

If they need those certs, perhaps.