Archive for August, 2010

 The following is an excerpt from an article by Grant Peterson, V.P. of Marketing & Sales at ECD, which discusses the use of lead-free in mission critical hi-rel applications. The article originally appeared on August 11 in SMT Online. The link at the end of this excerpt will take you to the complete online article.

Lead-free in Mission Critical – Failure Is Not An Option

    A mission-critical industry can be defined as one in which product failure can be catastrophic: threatening life or critical infrastructure, causing unacceptable collateral damage, and resulting in liability for OEM and/or EMS. Generally included are the military/aerospace, aviation, medical, and automotive industries. To confidently use lead-free in those high-reliability applications, especially considering the EU drive to impose RoHS on some areas currently exempt, it seems prudent to step back and determine where we are, how we got here, and what remains to be done.

    RoHS was implemented in the consumer sector before hi-rel industries for two reasons. First, consumer goods made up most landfills. But more importantly, it was initially assumed the lifespan for items like cell phones would give us approximately ten years to encounter and solve any lead-free related problems before moving into mission-critical areas. Life span, however, was greatly overestimated. Cell phones, computers, etc. are now replaced sooner and with greater frequency than originally anticipated. With this reduced time frame, we have neither seen the full extent of lead-free reliability problems, nor developed means to fully combat those we have. Can we really proceed to mission-critical areas with full confidence? Click here to go to the full SMT Online article.