Half of CIL's production is now RoHS compliant

Half of CIL's production is now RoHS compliant Half of all production at at CIL is now fully RoHS compliant and the company reports it has had no problems whatsoever in terms of the soldering process. Half of all production at CIL is now fully RoHS compliant. John Boston, managing director at CIL, reported that transition has been smoother than expected saying: 'Although we were extremely encouraged when we ran lead-free trials last year, in practice the transition has gone far better than we dared hope'.

'We have had no problems whatsoever in terms of the soldering process.

The only slight concern has been with the pattern recognition on the SMT placement machines due to the reflective qualities of a small minority of new lead-free components.

This issue was soon resolved by modifying the PRS lighting set up to accommodate the new components.' Boston is convinced that the use of modern manufacturing and test equipment has helped make the transition relatively straightforward.

'It is a great advantage that we have new manufacturing equipment and can carry out full test and diagnostic procedures with digital X-ray, flying probe ATE, ICT ATE, component shear and optical measurement equipment in house.

Without such equipment the transition would have been much more difficult.

Using normal visual methods, we at first thought that we were achieving very good soldering results, it was only when we started to use in house X-ray and component shear tests that we realised it was more complicated than first thought.

However, since we have the full diagnostic test and inspection package on site we were able to achieve very good results in a very short time period,' he said.

CIL plans that by the end of March all customers who need to be RoHS compliant will be catered for, but the company will continue to offer leaded assembly for those customers who do not have to comply with the new regulations.

Approximately 25% of the volume of CIL's production will remain leaded for the foreseeable future based upon customers' requirements.