2007 KOP RoHS requirements

[Danny Diaz]

Originally Posted by Jeff Pahl

As far as I know, all space and military electronics in the US are still using lead based soldering processes for reliability reasons.

I can verify this in relation to military electronics - National Instruments has converted about 90% of our products to be RoHS compliant, but on some product lines we've been forced to have dual designs and specifications. This is specifically due to the fact that our military customers demand the leaded products because the RoHS products just aren't as reliable and dependable. We've also had to watch our backsides because our vendors have also been changing out parts we use to be RoHS compliant without telling us. One day an entire batch of a certain very expensive board just started failing the first-pass tests - it took us significant engineering time to determine that the problem was related to a new batch of parts from a vendor containing RoHS-compliant parts (without changing the serial numbers or product codes) and the new RoHS-compliant part had significantly different operating characteristics!

For the forseeable future we're going to be forced to produce leaded products just for military contracts, and we're also forced to produce RoHS compliant products because many vendors/OEMs in Europe and the rest of the world refuse to use non-RoHS compliant products. Yuck!

-Danny