Hi Leo, and IPC LF Listservers, To add a little to what you and Werner said about low stress levels, probably low creep, and short life of some of these products. Some of these products for compactness purposes; as well as 3D design, are designed with flexible circuits, polyimide mostly, yet there are other materials). This material is quite compliant if designed reasonably thus extending life around the solder joint. As Werner noted, and I think I noted back awhile ago on elevator electronics, no one really does a failure analysis tree (prato, prade-oh) of why these products stopped working so the data is lost. Unless we in engineering get lucky and a big boo boo or medical or liability claim occurs the data can be lost for years if not forever. For Autos, since it is a longer life product, we get lucky since many independent groups track relative reliability and give reports so this forces this industry group to do a bit better work to come up above the bottom of the relative reliability reports. Most manufacturers copy others and some do have stress tests like dropping something onto a metal plate from 5 feet several times, or going from hot to cold fast to see if the product will survive infantile mortality type failures. Yet most usually stop at this point UNLESS they have warranties that will cost them big bucks (dollars, pounds, euros, yen, --) Yours in Engineering, Dave YiEngr, MA/NY DDave -------------------------------------------------------------------------------Leadfee Mail List provided as a service by IPC using LISTSERV 1.8d To unsubscribe, send a message to [log in to unmask] with following text in the BODY (NOT the subject field): SIGNOFF Leadfree To temporarily stop delivery of Leadree for vacation breaks send: SET Leadfree NOMAIL Search previous postings at: http://listserv.ipc.org/archives Please visit IPC web site http://www.ipc.org/contentpage.asp?Pageid=4.3.16 for additional information, or contact Keach Sasamori at [log in to unmask] or 847-509-9700 ext.5315 -------------------------------------------------------------------------------