LONDON -- The National Physical Laboratory has launched a six-month study into the use of XRF techniques.
NPL said in a press release that 10 companies have already signed on to participate in the project, which will assess XRF as a means for determining the presence and amount of various hazardous substances.
The protocol would include assessing a range of sample configurations incorporating known issues with RoHS-prohibited contaminants. Samples would be chemically analyzed prior to round-robin testing. After testing, the actual samples used will be chemically analyzed again to eliminate batch variance problems. The final report would include a comparison of XRF techniques and test sites.
The project is scheduled to launch this month July and last six months. The work will be presented to the NPL Soldering Science & Technology Club and disseminated in an NPL Report.
For more information contact Dr. Chris Hunt at chris.hunt@npl.co.uk
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SAN FRANCISCO – A group of 34 U.S. attorneys general on Friday filed suit in California District Court against seven computer memory chip manufacturers alleging the firms violated antitrust laws, and harmed consumers and governmental agencies, by conspiring to fix prices they charged for widely used DRAM chips.
The defendants include Infineon
Technologies, Hynix Semiconductor, Micron Technology, Mosel Vitelic, Nanya Technology, Elpida Memory and
NEC Electronics America. Also named as defendants were certain subsidiaries that sold and
distributed DRAM chips in the U.S.
Infineon, Hynix, Micron, along with Samsung, control roughly 70% of the U.S. market.
SAN JOSE – A Lockheed Martin engineer has devised a matrix
for gold content and is making the calculator available at no cost. The
nonproprietary Excel spreadsheet allows users to plug in solder and gold
thickness, plus the pad and component attach geometry, and then calculates the
percent-gold, making it simple to determine whether the fillet might encounter
gold-embrittlement problems.
Users could also create their own gold thresholds and color
schemes.