The "rant" from Phil Nutting about uncooperative component manufacturers
and the comment by Shawn Vike to any "component/hardware/connector/etc.
vendors listening" reminded me of a situation way back twenty-five years
ago when many component manufacturers were delivering components with
lousy termination solderability. (They were tin plated back then, too!)
I was just getting into the soldering business, and encountered similar
sentiments being expressed by component users when I attended Jim Raby's
annual Soldering Technology Seminars held in February at the Naval
Weapons Center in China Lake, CA.
What I quickly discovered was that there were no
component/hardware/connector/etc. vendors attending those seminars or
paying any attention at all to the rants I was hearing from the users.
From this I drew two conclusions: 1) the vendors, while being experts on
the components inside the package, didn't know enough about the package
itself, and 2) the people responsible for termination finish at the
vendors were not in touch with the engineers and operators having the
problems (too many layers of bureaucracy between them, on both sides).
I think that the situation today is actually better than back then. I
frequently come across papers on termination finish by competent people
at component manufacturers, and while they may express less concern
about the risks of tin whiskers than I as a user might have, at least
they are aware of that issue. And the internet has certainly allowed
more effective communication.
Of course, the decisions about part numbering and timing of finish
process conversions are business, not technical, so there are
differences, too.
But I doubt that there are very many vendors who are paying any
attention to this forum. I suspect that today, as back then, suppliers
and users mostly move in different circles and go to different
conferences.
In any case, just telling the world that you intend to take your
business elsewhere probably won't have nearly the effect that you might
hope that it would - apart from the psychic satisfaction of "getting it
off your chest". I suspect that the vendors figure that the people who
say such things are often not the people who make the buying decisions
for their company, and that the buyers probably know very little even
today about RoHS and the implications for their own companies. (Of
course, as Jon DeGenova points out, there are lots of vendors who still
don't know much about it either.) And even for the vendors who know, as
John Burke has pointed out there are many cases in which your need to
buy a part greatly exceeds your supplier's need to sell it to you.
My response back then (after several years) was to make contact with
some of the manufacturers, including personal visits (a lot more
manufacturing was done in the US back then), and even organizing some
seminars, to discuss the issues. 
I believe that such efforts by me and many others representing the users
eventually paid off. The industry standards for solderability are now
joint IPC-EIA standards. I know that solderability is far less of a
concern today than it used to be.
There must be someone at a high enough level in most companies who, if
he could be found and contacted, could be made to understand the RoHS
issues from the users' perspective. Unfortunately, in this situation,
there's now precious little time to attempt to make meaningful changes
from such contacts. 
I wonder if the good offices of the IPC might do more to help get the
message heard by the individual people at all those companies who need
to hear it - the ones who can make the right decisions. I recall that it
was Dieter Bergman who contacted EIA about making the industry soldering
standard a joint IPC-EIA standard - that's how the whole systems of
joint standards, beginning with J-STD-001, came to be. So I know that
such things can happen. (Maybe they already  are and I just don't know
about them.)

Gordon Davy 
Baltimore, MD 
[log in to unmask]
410-993-7399 

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