Hi Bob, Thanks for the feedback. Unfortunately, it is ignorant remark like the one you are quoting, that gets the whole industry into trouble. It is were dangerous to judge the rest of the industry of one's limited perspective—see my recent blog in the IPC blogs. Werner -----Original Message----- From: Bob Landman <rlandman@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> To: Leadfree@xxxxxxx Sent: Sat, Jul 18, 2009 11:25 am Subject: Re: [LF] [RoHSUSAPushback] Update on H.B. 2420 Colleagues: This past week I attended a SMTA/IEEE joint meeting on lead free manufacturing. The presenters statements, as well as those in attendance, except for myself a few others, were sanguine about the reliability of lead free manufacturing today. A statement was made by a reliability engineer with many years experience that there was no reliability concerns now that lead has been eliminated except perhaps for NASA space projects because “most electronics has a useful life of 3 years”. The agenda of the meeting: July_2009_SMTA-IEEE joint_meeting - Hudson NH.pdf Are you all prepared to toss the electronics you have purchased in 3-5 years since the RoHS law came into effect? Willing to role the dice? What about all the extremely expensive test equipment being purchased today (from Agilent, Tektronix, Teradyne, etc..) It is all lead free now. Is there really nothing to worry about? Are you saying to yourself “I doubt it will happen to me”? What convinced you? Where’s the evidence? On what is your level of confidence based? Isn’t it so that lead-free electronics is in its infancy? Hasn’t the literature made it clear it takes years to show the failures (and they may be intermittent failures which are very hard to find)? How about that new car you just purchased that is loaded with electronics (which includes pollution controls, air bag deployment and anti-lock brakes). How about that rapid transit train you ride to work every day in that is controlled by electronics? Did you see the pictures of the crash of the Wash DC Metro a few weeks ago? That was blamed on a failure of the control system. http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/14/us/14rail.html WASHINGTON — A single broken part probably caused last month’s deadly train crash here, the National Transportation Safety Boardhinted Monday, as it issued an urgent recommendation to local and federal authorities to evaluate similar systems around the country for “adequate safety redundancy.” More than ever before, technology is connected to our lives in a very intimate way. Someone you know has a pacemaker. Cardiac pacemakers have failed due to tin whiskers – did you know that? The FDA recalled them - 2008-Brusse-Pacemaker Committee-Metal Whiskers.pdf There have been many recent articles on the sub ject which clearly indicate that tin whiskering is still a concern. Here are links to them so you can judge for yourselves. (or do you not want to know, you want to maintain your lead-free innocence?) Several quotes come to mind as I reflected on what I was hearing that evening… Mark Twain said ““It ain't what you don't know that gets you into trouble. It's what you know for sure that just ain't so.” Louis Pasteur noted that “In the fields of observation chance favors only the prepared mind”. 1) APEX 09 Bare Board Material Performance after Pb-free Reflow -presentation.pdf (excellent very detailed study of reliability of lead free pc boards) 2) apex tin mitigation Lesniewski.pdf (suggestions on how to mitigate (not eliminate) tin whiskering) 3) NASA_DoD LFE Project-June-24-2009_SN whisker tele.pdf (excellent presentation by Kurt Kessel of NASA Kennedy on extended life testing of lead-free mfg) 4) The Pb-free Manhattan project.pdf (why is this proposed $60M project necessary?) 5) Borgesen_Lead_free_reliability.pdf (Borgeson notes here how one can be deceived by the design of experiment into thinking all is well with lead free mfg) 6) Developing a NASA Lead-Free Policy for Electroncs_Lessons Learned.pdf 7) Pb-free DoD brochure.pdf and DID for LFCP DI-MGMT-81772.doc (DOD cautions to be aware of lead-free problems) NASA also has quite a collection of articles at this link http://nepp.nasa.gov/WHISKER/ Bob Landman, President Senior Member, IEEE IEEE Power & Energy/Reliability Societies H&L Instruments, LLC www.hlinstruments.com -------------------------------------------------------------------------------Leadfee Mail List provided as a service by IPC using LISTSERV 1.8d To unsubscribe, send a message to LISTSERV@xxxxxxx with following text in the BODY (NOT the subject field): SIGNOFF Leadfree To temporarily stop/(start) delivery of Leadree for vacation breaks send: SET Leadfree NOMAIL/(MAIL) Search previous postings at: http://listserv.ipc.org/archives Please visit IPC web site http://www.ipc.org/contentpage.asp?Pageid=4.3.16 for additional information, or contact Keach Sasamori at sasako@xxxxxxx or 847-615-7100 ext.2815 -------------------------------------------------------------------------------