PEMSTAR has announced that it has received full qualification status for lead-free SMT processing.
"This qualification status marks another important milestone in helping PEMSTAR's customers to comply with pending global environmental protection initiatives, including the European Union's Restriction of Hazardous Substances (RoHS) legislation. This legislation will require the restriction of a number of hazardous substances, including lead, from electronic components by July 1, 2006." said Roy Bauer, President and COO of PEMSTAR. "We have been working closely with our supply chain and with our OEM customers to proactively prepare for the new design and manufacturing requirements resulting from these environmental initiatives. This qualification milestone builds on the lead-free manufacturing processing that PEMSTAR has been providing to its customers over the past 15 months in its North America, Europe, and Asia facilities."
PEMSTAR facilities in North America, Europe, and Asia have passed lead-free validation consisting of the following industry based testing processes
-Visual inspection according to the latest revision of IPC-A-610
-Cross-section and microscopic analysis for intermetallics, coating integrity and general defects.
-Cross-section and microscopic analysis for solder wetting and fillet quality
-Voiding analysis on ball grid arrays (BGA's) with X-ray
-Comprehensive reliability testing PEMSTAR offers a full complement of value added services structured to align with each customer's own environmental roadmap:
- Materials Declaration Assessment -- including completion of RoHS questionnaire, requirements definition, road-map review, component supplier screening, declaration database administration, and audit trail
management.
- Supply Chain Management Services -- working collaboratively with OEM
customers and component suppliers/manufacturers to develop conversion schedules for impacted components and to develop manufacturing processes, that fulfill the customer's compliance strategy.
- Product Re-design Services -- for those product design containing components which will never have RoHS compliant replacements available, PEMSTAR offers a phased engineering approach to generate concepts,specifications, detailed designs, and prototypes to develop a fully realized, RoHS compliant product, ready for manufacture.
