Well I don't expect it to explode ;) And, I think we have already established that all electronics related technical questions are exceptable debate foder for this list. So drop the appology and tell us afterwards what your experiences were.
The issue, I think, is can you solder the lead free device to a board with a lead based solder and make a good conduct? I suspect the answer is yes. If it doesn't seem to work use some more flux. Inspect the solder conection in the typical method looking for cold solder joints. Lead free seems to indicate that the device not only doesn't contain any significant lead but that it also can withstand the higher temperatures that lead free solders require. So if you can get a lead based solder to adhear to the devices pins then the lower solder temperature shouldn't be a problem to the device. If the device is in a solder ball based package such as a BGA then you might have to cook the board with the device at a higher temperature in order to get it connected. If this is the case and you are including older devices on the same board then the increased temperature might damage the older devices. In this case a stratagy of cooking the board with just the non-lead parts first then attaching and re-cooking the board with the lead based parts might be the right idea. This issue of visual inspection for cold solder joints is going to be more complex with non-lead based solder. This is do to all solder joints looking shiny (as i recall from the seminar I attended) even if they are bad with the silver tn based solders. As always I would look at what ipc has to say about the ROHS issues. http://leadfree.ipc.org/RoHS_2-0.asp Also, these thought are comming randomly, if you are working with a good assembly shop talk to them. Best Wishes, Steve Meier Dave McGuire wrote: > > Hi folks. I'm sorry for the off-topic post, but this is the best > collection of relevant talent that I know of. > > A surface-mount chip I've been using is now only available as a > lead-free product. I've done *nothing* with lead-free stuff...Can I > safely solder it using my standard lead-bearing solder? > > Thanks, > -Dave > > -- > Dave McGuire > Cape Coral, FL > >