(August 12, 2005) Colorado Springs, Colo. &#8212 IC Interconnect (ICI), a wafer bumping service company, now offers lead-free wafer-bumping capabilities as a standard service offering in recognition of the EU’s looming RoHS initiatives.

(August 15, 2005) Dallas, Texas &#8212 Texas Instruments (TI) is implementing its RoHS “Gold” strategy for its IC products to offer simple solutions to RoHS component transition challenges. RoHS “Gold” provides customers with nickel/palladium/gold (NiPdAu) leadframe-based products, eliminating tin whiskering, as well as unique part numbers for bill-of-materials (BOM) management and online access to key material content information at www.ti.com/ecoinfo.

“TI’s RoHS ‘Gold’ strategy was developed to help make the RoHS transition process easier,” states Eric Williams, TI’s lead-free program office manager. “Our customers have routinely highlighted the importance of these three elements in order to meet their time-to-market needs.”

In 1989, TI first implemented the nickel/palladium-based finish to its Logic ICs, and has since shipped over 30 billion units into the market. The NiPdAu finish is TI’s primary RoHS-compliant finish for leadframe-based products. Today, over 98% of those products have already been converted to the NiPdAu finish, which is also backward-compatible with traditional, leaded manufacturing processes.

The RoHS “Gold” strategy’s part numbering facilitates management of new RoHS-compliant BOMs, ensuring RoHS-compliant parts are ordered, received, and board-mounted properly. For leadframe-based products, TI has adopted a 2-character suffix based on the JEDEC JESD97 solder finish codes. For BGA-based products, the RoHS-compliant version is not backward-compatible, so a different part-numbering scheme is used that includes a “Z” in the package suffix.