RoHS-compliant or not, when does it matter?

As the industry scrambled towards RoHS compliance, manufacturers of mission-critical products successfully campaigned for exemption because of fears over tin-whiskers and the lack of field-data on the reliability of lead-free components. It is ironic, therefore, that many of these manufacturers have now discovered they have been using RoHS-compliant, lead-free components.

At the heart of the problem is the way in which different manufacturers decided to manage their part numbers during the transition from lead-inclusive to lead-free parts.

Some manufacturers decided to use existing part numbers to identify the new lead-free versions and use a new suffix or part number to identify the legacy parts. Suddenly, customers who had been ordering the same part number for years, were receiving lead-free parts in place of the lead-inclusive versions they were expecting.

Under no obligation to actively advise either their distributors or customers of these changes, component manufacturers shipped the new versions and customers put them into their manufacturing processes.

It has fallen to distribution to differentiate their inventories, which for those where legacy parts still account for 25 per cent of sales, has meant creating new part numbers for some legacy products.

Going forward, it appears that the inadvertent use of compliant parts may lead some manufacturers of potentially exempt parts to take a more pragmatic approach and to buy either legacy or lead-free components for non-critical systems. For others, the demand for legacy parts will continue and will be supported by specialist distributors and component manufacturers.

Edmund Coady is sales director at Charcroft