“Our experience in the PCB market shows there are still too many designers out there who have simply seen RoHS as ‘a product that contains no lead’, and that by ticking the ‘materials must be RoHS-compliant’ box, they assume their product becomes compliant. This is dangerous thinking, as mere adherence to the letter of RoHS legislation, may well be creating huge problems further down the line for OEM suppliers. With the advent of RoHS, that relatively simple relationship between designer and supplier has been turned on its head. Designers, cognisant of the fact they need to meet RoHS compliance standards now add the note into their designs that ‘all materials must be compliant’, without realising that the necessary adoption of lead-free alternatives has huge knock-on effects for other materials used in the manufacturing process. While a designer may be right to tick the ‘compliance required’ box on his submitted drawings, we are aware of instances where adopting the letter of the law and blindly adopting lead-free solders in isolation would be product suicide. In reality, adhering to the designer’s RoHS-friendly specifications would create a fully compliant, but totally flawed product. The reason being that laminates – even those that pass the stringent FR4 test for quality – are generally unable to withstand the much higher temperatures required to work with lead-free solders. Hence, FR4 standard laminates, as specified by designers looking for the best quality boards, would find their RoHS-compliant PCBs suffering from the effects of Z axis expansion during assembly as well as potential board decomposition. Even if the boards survive the assembly process, the potential for failure in the field is vastly increased.” Source: electronicsweekly.com