What is SenDEC Doing About the RoHS and Lead-Free Initiatives?
By now you have probably heard about Lead-Free and RoHS. If not, here is the quick scoop! The European Parliament and its Council on Hazardous Substances in Electrical and Electronic Equipment, issued a directive banning lead, mercury, cadmium, hexavalent chromium and two types of brominated flame retardants (PBB and PBDE), which will take effect on July 1, 2006, with some exceptions.
What does all this mean? Well, it means companies shipping product into Europe had better start looking at the elimination of these “hazardous materials” from their products. If they don’t, their products may be sent back, or worse yet, may be confiscated. Europe wants none of this in their ecosystem, including their landfills!
If you think you’re in great shape because you don’t ship product to Europe, think again. In addition to Europe, Japan has already moved to lead-free and California is ready to pass similar legislation to RoHS. So, we all need to get ready to meet the requirements NOW!
What has SenDEC done to prepare for RoHS? Over the past year SenDEC has been formulating a strategy to deal with the many changes brought on by RoHS. The biggest change for SenDEC will be the soldering of components with no lead in the solder and the component leads. Soldering of lead-free components cannot be done at the same temperature as with leaded solder. As a result, SenDEC has already added a new SMT reflow oven and a new dedicated wave solder machine to work with these new lead-free solder pastes and solders.
 In addition to the new equipment, SenDEC has also approved specific lead-free solder pastes, qualified bare printed circuit board suppliers for “lead-free” boards, and met with distribution and component manufacturers to discuss the status of component supply. SenDEC has also implemented a new part numbering system to quickly distinguish between a lead free component and a leaded one.
Give SenDEC a call to help with your RoHS design. We are ready to help design and build your circuit board assembly, or complete turnkey product -----NOW.
Please call Julie Sullivan to discuss how SenDEC can help you "Get The Lead Out".
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