A cast-iron certainty

Citation

Lea, C. (1999), "A cast-iron certainty", Soldering & Surface Mount Technology, Vol. 11 No. 2. https://doi.org/10.1108/ssmt.1999.21911baa.001

A cast-iron certainty

A cast-iron certainty

For all but the most entrenched cynics and confirmed hermits amongst us, roundnumberitis will touch us and steer our thinking during 1999. It will be a year of getting ready, for preparation for the new millennium. This may be nothing more than a circumstantial date change but it will certainly focus our minds and offer an excuse for planning and for change. 1999 will be a year for retrospection, for reviewing the decade, the century and indeed the passing millennium.

The world will of course be overflowing with predictions on every subject under the sun: social, economic and technological. The very complexity of life on Earth will ensure that a few will come to pass in the fullness of time. But most will be far removed from what actually happens, for reality is not only stranger than fiction but often beyond our wildest technological dreams.

Not to buck the trend, and perhaps to get in ahead of the field, I offer my predictions for the electronics manufacturing industry: one long term, one medium term and one a cast-iron short term certainty.

As the long term opportunity, I see the end of plastic cards, smart cards, IT passwords, train tickets, signing authorisations, and the like. All human-kind will be implanted with a device that will track finances and commercial transactions as well as monitor health functions. Truly, the ambulance will be parked up outside your house ten minutes before your heart attack.

In the medium term (and I am obliged to Peter Grundy for crystallising my thoughts on this), the opportunity for European industry lies in the rapid design and production of ASICs. Decades ago the perceived wisdom was that more and more integration would take place on the chip with very little requirement for innovative design outside the chip: leads for the power and the signal I/O would suffice. This of course has not happened. SOICs have progressed to QFPs and then BGAs, requiring brilliant circuit designing with standard building blocks and inspirational manufacturing advances. Maybe now is the time, when labour costs are the main economic driver, to seize the challenge and the opportunity on offer with application-specific integration and less complicated design and manufacture.

The 1990 years have been a decade of increasing environmental pressure for the electronics manufacturing industry. The environmental concerns of the public and the legislators will continue to grow and, as a consequence, regulatory control will grip harder. So this is my cast-iron certainty for the next decade.

Because of the nature of its business, its acceptance to be driven by technological fashion and to deal with a fast turnover of manufacturing processes, the electronics manufacturing industry has led the way towards "cleaner and greener" goals, most notably in its elimination of ozone depleting chemicals. From 1987 through to today the industry has pursued collaborative research programmes to evaluate alternatives to CFCs, and educational programmes to bring on board the whole manufacturing supply chain. It has been a very open-hearted period of generosity amongst competitors, with experiences and expertises, sometimes hard won, being freely promulgated for the good of the industry as a whole. New environmental problems are here now, with compliance deadlines fast approaching. As an industry we should learn the lessons from the CFC experience.

The campaign to eliminate CFCs was successful because the reasons and the urgency were appreciated by the public, the legislators and the industrial users alike. Strong regulatory control comes from robust scientific evidence of the risk, public awareness of the consequences of that risk, and a perception of fairness in the implementation of the regulation. It was the outbreak of cholera and typhus in urban Victorian England that led to the 1875 Public Health Act; the lung-destroying rains from caustic soda works that brought about the first controls on atmospheric discharges in the 1863 Alkali Act; and the great smogs of the 1950s which killed 5,000 Londoners that persuaded Parliament to legislate against smoke emissions in the 1956 Clean Air Act. It was the unpredicted but clear evidence of the Antarctic ozone hole and the public concern over the expected increases in skin cancers and eye cataracts that enabled the Montreal Protocol, the first global environmental contract, to be agreed so rapidly. The Protocol was signed in 1987, only two years after the first reports of the ozone hole, and made more aggressive successively with the 1990 London Amendment, the 1992 Copenhagen Amendment, and subsequent EU Directives, all backed by public awareness and, to some extent, public pressure. Again, it will be the scientific evidence and public acceptance of global warming (averaged globally, 1998 was the hottest year on record, and the ten hottest years on record have all been since 1983) that will enable stricter controls to be placed on the use of volatile chemicals and emissions of greenhouse gases, and even the instigation of an energy tax at sometime in the not-too-distant future.

Recently, the publication of a draft EU Directive on Waste from Electrical and Electronic Equipment (WEEE) has suddenly thrown lead-free soldering into the spotlight. Although principally about waste management and recycling, the Directive seeks to ban the use of lead in all aspects of electronics manufacturing, with two exceptions. Soldering is neither of these exceptions. (Incidentally, the Directive also contains a proposal to eliminate brominated fire retardants found in the PCB laminates.) The lead-free bandwagon is rolling. Alternative lead-free solders are available. Awareness programmes, training schemes and helplines are all being hatched. Seemingly every trade magazine, every month has a lead-free article. Apparently it will happen. Maybe not as soon as January 2004, as proposed, but it will happen sooner rather than later. But where is the public awareness, the public concern on this issue? What indeed are the environmental dangers? Has anyone measured the risks, predicted the medium or long term benefits of the abandonment of lead? In the UK alone, six million pieces of electronic equipment are dumped in landfill every year. Lead from the solder, it is said, leaches out into the water table. So lead must go. But must it? There is an alternative: the development of technologies to enable design and manufacture for disassembly of electronics, with economic incentives for recycling. Has the industry acquiesced too meekly in its acceptance of the inevitability of lead-free manufacturing? Maybe this is the way the industry ought to go, the way it wants to go, but have the options been openly debated? Has anyone asked you? Have you made your views known?

Colin LeaNational Physical LaboratoryTeddington