10 Apr
2010
10 Apr
'10
2:57 p.m.
With BGAs, you don't have leads, so after a couple
of thermal shifts most of
the solder joints will have sheared off the board.
No.
The little solder ball blob (the B in BGA) is there specifically to
act as a cantilever to absorb stresses. IBM figured this out when they
pioneered the technology in the 1960s. Without the tiny amount of give
that the ball gives, failures would be so frequent that the devices
would be useless, especially in today's world of relatively high
power, small outline devices that are constantly going to sleep and
waking up.
I can see a huge spike in the amount of electroscrap
sent off for disposal:
solder failures and so on. You can argue that the lack of lead makes it
"safer", but there are still other things in the plastic cases and PCBs that
-- AIUI -- are much more harmful than the lead in the solder.
PCBs? They have pretty much been out of the picture for a long time.
Scrap plastic cases are now a resource - in China, scrap plastic is
currently worth more than scrap steel.
Fact is, the Eurocrats decided they needed to look
like they were doing
something, so they passed an ill-thought-out monstrosity of a law...
For all the pissing and moaning about RoHS solder, the reliability
numbers really do not show a sky-is-falling disaster. If it did, world
economies would be collapsing.
Chill...
--
Will