Hi,
We have been soldering lead free BGA's onto products with lead based paste, and we have had no increase in defects at all. We have used a standard lead paste profile, so we are not altering the temps anything from what's recommended by the paste manufacturer, and we don't rely on the lead free solder balls on the BGA from collapsing. And this is on one of our most reliable products.
So lead free BGA's are fine as far as we can see, and I agree that a lot of this research is designed to scare. Remember when you had to trash every bit of equpment you had because BGA came along, but when you actually started working with BGA they were one of the easiest parts to use?
We also paid to attend a popular lead free consultants seminars on lead free about a year ago, and he had run a lot of production on lead free, and he also said from his experience that soldering lead free BGA's onto lead was fine.
However this thread was about soldering lead based BGA with lead free paste, and that was not recommended at all. I don't actually understand why anyone would want to do this, because the product would not technically pass as a lead free product, so why not solder with lead based solder paste?
If someone wants to solder a lead based BGA onto a lead free board, with lead free solder paste, then it's not going to be a lead free product. So it would be a fraud to have a lead free product that still had some lead free parts on it.
Could you split production and send any remaining lead based parts on a lead solder build, and then get them into the US market, while doing lead free runs with lead free parts to Europe and Japan?
That's what we are going to do as we might have some small qty's of lead based parts we will want to use up before the deadline, but we need to change over in May the latest otherwise our stock might remain in the reseller channel before being sold before the deadline. This lead free deadline is really earlier for us because we need to make sure there is no lead free finished product in the sales channel before the cut off date.
Regards,
Grant
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