Wow, first lead-free victim: Microsoft Xbox 1 billion damage

They don't blame lead free soldering, but they blame poor thermal design. The designers just cut too many corners.

Not exactly.

I am looking into this, and one aspect is teh higher surface tension of lead-free solders (then SnPb), A higher surface tension means it will ball itself together again if heated enough, rather then wet the copper contact pads. That is enough, end if MS design did not take that into account you get exactly this problem.

I aint't saying it is this, but the German article says something like: 'Experts think', so who am I to question... (in this case anyways ;-) )

Er, Um, not quite just TIn as the culprit.

The XBox seems to have been generally poorly designed, mechanically and thermally.

Just as one example that has led to thousands of failures in warranty-- The power socket tends to break loose. Now if you were designing a consumer box, tended to be used by rambunctious youths, might not you give a few seconds extra thought regarding simple mechanical issues, like fastening connectors properly?

When heated? If a chip gets hot enough to melt the tin, you have a different problem.

On a sunny day (Tue, 10 Jul 2007 20:13:10 GMT) it happened snipped-for-privacy@puntnl.niks (Nico Coesel) wrote in :

One thing mentioned on joystick.com was that the 'red ring of death' started after a user started using the xbox on its side. Maybe the chip just fell of?

after

There may be a dozen of reasons why this could happen. If a lot of units have this problem the cause is either bad design or a production process that has not been well controlled. It takes time and experience to get a reflow oven to work well for a certain PCB. This goes for both leaded and lead free soldering.

Ever stop to think that it may just have extremely poor air handling design, resulting in poor cooling?

thermal stressing: it was an accident waiting to happen.

this is a message I got from a large EU PCB manufacturer a while back:

======================================================================

if you ask me ROHS is nothing but trouble ;) we completely moved to ROHS in February this year, but had great pressure from Texas Instruments and ST Microelectronics since September last year and the major problem was to move out all components with lead plating on their legs away from our stock, it took about 6 month to completely use all old components and fill our stock with only lead free components.

now we produce our boards with immersion gold finish which increase the cost of bare boards by 20% and the lead free soldering alloy and consumables are at twice higher prices than normal SnPb, all this I could accept, but the final result is about 20% less reliable boards, the Pb is the soft component of SnPb alloy, the new Pb-free alloys miss this "soft" component and are less reliable to vibrations and temperature changes, as Pb-free soldering joints tend to crack sooner than SnPb joints when exposed to cold-hot termal shocks, this is why Pb-free boards are not allowed in medical, military, automotive applications where reliability is must.

I understand German well but I fail to see any mention of being a victim of lead-free soldering in that article.

Not that I like RoHS. I don't like it at all.

Well, that's just the problem. "a large EU PCB manufacturer" isn't going to cut it. Except for the Swatch story I haven't read anything yet that would provide company names and telephone numbers. Until that happens nothing is going to stop the bureaucrats. They'll say it's all just rumors and grapevine talk.

Silly rabbit. He was talking about the XBox 360 being an industry victim.

On a sunny day (Wed, 11 Jul 2007 22:10:56 GMT) it happened Joerg wrote in :

Als eine mögliche Fehlerursache vermuten Experten das auf der Platine

--------^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^----------^^^^^^^^ verwendete bleifreie Lot, das wegen der häufigen Temperaturwechsel brüchig

-----------^^^^^^^^^^^^^ ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^ werden könnte. ^^^^^^^^^^^^^

Also warum nicht?

My brother-in-law is a manager at Textron, doing military stuff. He tells me that they send out tens of thousands of ICs a month to have their leads retinned with leaded solder. It's expensive.

John

Subject line of this thread: "Wow, first lead-free victim: Microsoft Xbox 1 billion damage" ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

"vermuten" ist "assume". I'd have expected a wee bit more meat here ;-)

For good reason I guess. I had to order a VME extender a while ago and it came only in lead-free. So I ordered it. When I took a close look at the solder joints I almost felt sick :-(

On a sunny day (Thu, 12 Jul 2007 15:16:20 GMT) it happened Joerg wrote in :

Experts assume ? Pretty strong. Almost as strong as WMDs in Iraq, maybe even stronger.

Only if accompanied by evidence. Microscope photos, names, telephone numbers ....

On a sunny day (Thu, 12 Jul 2007 08:51:24 -0700) it happened Joerg wrote in :

As millions of people have xbox360 anyone can open it and look. Heise.de is very very reliable in reporting, it is not like some of those quack sites. And they have some very knowledgeable experts themselves, I guess if you are in severe doubt about what they write, you can email them, you can, as you are good in German, reply to the article in the forum simply by registering your name and clicking on the link at the bottom of the page: 'Kommentare lesen (86 Beiträge)' So far 86 responses (in German).