While complying with various Restriction of Hazardous Substances (RoHS) directives and regulations may be proving problematic for the industry, the pain of reporting what is exactly in electronic products may soon be alleviated.
As the industry moves to comply with environmental regulations set to go into effect this year in Europe and elsewhere, materials declarations, while perhaps not as difficult as developing a viable lead-free solder, have proven difficult on both sides of the supplier/buyer equation, thanks to a lack of standardisation.
Declarations of compliance from electronic component vendors have varied significantly as the industry gears up to meet the European deadline. Some are providing a verbal statement of compliance, while others may provide a written statement of compliance with RoHS directives, which may or may not contain a list of the materials in the part in question. Some vendors are reluctant to provide detailed information on materials, not necessarily for fraudulent reasons, but for competitive reasons.
In any case, it has created headaches all along the supply chain, not only for suppliers and customers – who have contributed to the problem as well, by asking for data in varying formats – but distributors, as well.
But the US trade body IPC, building on earlier efforts by Jedec, iNEMI and other industry bodies, is set to adopt a materials declaration standard – actually two standards – likely by early next month. While some in the industry have criticised the efforts as coming too late in the lead-free process, IPC maintains it will serve to ease the aforementioned problems.
The standards are designed to create a common electronic data format for materials declaration and provide standard forms, simplifying the exchange of data.
"It is a burden reduction," said Fern Abrams, director of environmental policy for IPC, describing the principal benefit of adopting a formal standard for materials declaration. "By having a standard form and format, companies will be able to standardise their responses to a multitude of customers," she continued. "Instead of taking 30 to 40 hours to answer a single customer inquiry, it will probably take about half hour, because it will be standardised."
The proposed materials declaration process is based on XML technology and uses common forms in PDF format. Companies will be able to take it a step further, however, if they choose, Abrams suggested; since the standard is based in XML, custom software could be written to automate the declaration process, connecting a supplier's database with their customer's database.
That naturally provides a benefit to the customer as well, if they utilize the standard form it will naturally make the electronic exchange of data for the materials declaration easier.
The two new standards are titled IPC-1751, Generic Requirements for Declaration Process Management, and IPC-1752, Materials Declaration Management. Regardless of whether they come late to the process, there is clearly interest in them, with the likes of Intel and Celestica giving the standards attention. Upon publishing the first draft of the standards in June of last year, IPC had more than 1,400 downloads of the drafts, from more than 73 countries. It received more than 500 comments back on that initial draft.
The final draft was put out for industry ballot last December; the IPC's balloting committee met early last month to review the results of the ballot and the comments it received with those ballots. As a result, IPC plans to publish the standard soon -- ideally it hopes to have it ready to release in conjunction with the IPC Printed Circuits Expo/APEX /Designers Summit slated to be held the week of February 5 in Anaheim, Calif.
"This will probably be the fastest that IPC has built and published a standard, but we had a running start," Abrams observed, acknowledging the work that was done earlier by groups such as Jedec and iNEMI, as well as the help it has received from the National Institute of Science and Technology and Adobe Systems. The committee putting the standards together already has a long list of ideas to improve the standard, but with the European RoHS deadline looming, it didn't want to hold up its implementation, she added.
At the top of that list is data validation, ensuring that data presented in the standardised forms is consistent. Right now that validation will have to be done by hand, or custom software will have to be written to provide it. But the IPC hopes to build that validation into the next iteration of the materials declaration standard and automate it.
Abrams noted that the standards committee meeting scheduled for February 7 in Anaheim will be open to all registrants of the show, not just IPC members, and that they will be taking comments then, as well as setting a schedule going forward for planned changes to the standard. "That meeting will be the kickoff of the next iteration of the standard," she remarked.
When it is published, the related forms will be available for download from the IPC's website.
www.ipc.org
See also: Electronics Weekly's roundup of content related to The ROHS Directive