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They exist in your company.
You have seen them during the last 18 months. They have dark circles under their eyes and have refilled the ink cartridge in the fax machine 14 times while receiving information from your suppliers.
These exhausted people are your company’s RoHS compliance experts. And if you plan to ship any products to the European Union after July 1 of this year, those tired eyes will be visible for many more months.
These people do not have time to educate you right now on RoHS, so InFlow now offers you a crash course.
RoHS stands for Restriction of Hazardous Substances. Also known as Directive 2002/95/EC, RoHS originated in Europe and restricts the use of specific hazardous materials found in both electrical and electronic products. This directive will affect a number of products shipped to the EU. They include but are not limited to:
- Household appliances
- IT and telecommunications equipment
- Lighting equipment
- Electrical and electronic tools
- Toys
- Sports equipment
- Medical devices
- Monitoring and Control Instruments
RoHS Compliance is aimed at not only reducing hazardous materials that can pollute the environment and landfills, but which are also hazardous to the people that work with the materials during the manufacturing and recycling processes.
After July 1, 2006, all applicable products bound for the European market must be RoHS compliant. For more complete information about this directive, see the European United Laboratories site: http://www.ul-europe.com/en/solutions/services/rscs.php.
There are currently several materials that are banned under RoHS:
- Lead (Pb)
- Mercury (Hg)
- Cadmium (Cd)
- Hexavalent chromium (CrVI)
- Polybrominated biphenyls (PBB)
- Polybrominated diphenyl ethers (PBDE).
As if product development professionals are not dealing with enough acronyms, RoHS is tightly related to another directive called WEEE. Also called the Waste from Electrical and Electronic Equipment (Directive 2002/96/EC), WEEE mandates the treatment, recovery and recycling of electric and electronic equipment. After August 13, 2006, all applicable products in Europe must pass WEEE compliance and carry the "Wheelie Bin" sticker.
In a nutshell, WEEE aims to encourage the design of environmentally safe products with recycling and recovery in mind. RoHS aims to reduce the amount of hazardous chemicals used in electronic manufacturing.
To make matters more confusing, individual companies may develop their own level of compliance. For instance, your company may be a supplier to 3 different companies that manufacture cell phones. Each of these companies may provide you separate compliance information that you must adhere to, which may be even more stringent than RoHS. Furthermore, California is releasing a similar initiative (Proposition 65), and over 20 additional US states plan to deliver similar legislation this year. Both China and Japan have announced similar initiatives to RoHS, which may take effect as early as 2007. Canada, Australia, Taiwan are among additional countries which hope to pass initiatives similar to RoHS.
Why is this a design issue?
RoHS compliance is often perceived as a manufacturing problem. This is a common misconception…"I have completed my design. The materials group and manufacturing can now select the RoHS compliant parts and build it so that it is compliant." This process of replacing non-compliant parts with RoHS compliant parts is often called BOM scrubbing and, while seemingly simple, is a costly approach with a number of potentially fatal problems. Consider this: more than half of the parts in many designs are discrete parts. These discrete parts tend to get checked for compliance every time a product is released. This superfluous compliance checking, over numerous designs, adds a considerable amount of time to the product development lifecycle. Additionally, there's the concern that a component change may have a negative affect on the performance of the design…and this may not be discovered until the prototype has been tested.
How can InFlow help?
InFlow, commonly known as the data management group of CATI, has spent a great deal of time researching the types of solutions that will help its customers comply with RoHS. We have found that companies are looking to solve RoHS issues early in the design process, generating reports based on material properties and the sum total of parts used in a CAD Bill of Material (BOM). In order to do this, it is necessary to deploy a solution that:
- Understands the BOM developed in native CAD applications
- Manages data as well as files. For example, items such as materials and suppliers may be data that is crucial to your project, but this information may not be related to a specific file
- Manages a Component Database that maintains the individual material properties and RoHS compliance declarations
- Contains Analytic Tools that aggregate material declarations at the BOM level and analyze product compliance, identify non-compliant parts, and highlight incomplete component material declarations
InFlow has identified several solutions that will assist product development companies in meeting RoHS compliance.
These solutions fit under the umbrella of Product Lifecycle Management, or PLM. They are aimed at managing and distributing data related to product development projects across the project lifecycle, as well as managing the processes by which these products are developed, changed, and approved.
Where Do We Get Started?
InFlow is glad to talk to your team about your specific RoHS issues, the solutions that we have identified, and the process by which these tools can be deployed.
So print out this article (or forward it on), grab your company’s RoHS expert, buy them a cup of coffee, and invite them to contact InFlow to set up a meeting. After all, July 1 is right around the corner, and those dark circles are not getting any smaller.
-Eric Gold
Business Development Manager
847.353.8661 x 239
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