VIA Announces Lead-Free Motherboard

linuxprox writes "VIA announced today that their AS-1210 motherboard will be the world's first lead-free motherboard. 'The transition to 'green' manufacturing for VIA has been very smooth and we have been able to ship lead-free processors and chipsets since the end of last year,' said Richard Brown, Vice President of Marketing, VIA Technologies, Inc. 'The AS-1210 clearly demonstrates the technology leadership of VIA and Yamashita in being the first to market with a lead-free motherboard that meets the requirements of the international market.'"

more to read

[tedtimmons]

I was trying to figure out what the lead was used for (traces, solder, and capacitors was my best bet). The following link from Intel is a press release, but contains a good overview of lead use:
http://www.intel.com/pressroom/archive/releases/20 040407tech.htm [intel.com]

And more from Intel:
http://www.intel.com/research/silicon/leadfree.htm [intel.com]

And more information from AMD:
http://www.amd.com/us-en/Processors/TechnicalResou rces/0,,30_182_4040,00.html [amd.com]

Disclosure: I don't work for, or own stock in AMD or Intel. I haven't purchased an Intel chip since the Pentium came out.

-ted

Green Computing

[Anonymous Coward]

VIA Green Computing page [via.com.tw]

It's too bad they don't do monitors. Those CRTs are the biggest source of lead in computers. Of course, I don't like electrons being shot at my face, so it's not all bad, but still. They are a pain to dispose of.

Cross your fingers for affordable OLEDs. (fp?)

A nice start, but...

[Mr. Darl McBride]

This is really more of a touchy feel-good move than a substantive move in cutting back on the more dangerous parts of the motherboard.

This doesn't do a thing about the lethal levels of sheel negceba that go through most boards, not to mention the chemicals used in most non-paper capacitors, which are not only lethal poisons, but as tasty as anti-freeze to most animals.

Add to this the PCBs in the transformer that go with their power supply, and you've pretty much only addressed the fourth worst problem. The real problems have several orders of magnitude more impact on the environtment and worse -- solutions already exist to solve all three for prices only 5-10% higher than what they pay for existing chemicals!

Re:Green?

[DAldredge]

Well, they make some red and blue ones that they sell to the people that put windows on the side of their towers.

I wish I was joking.

Re:A nice start, but...

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, everybody knows what lead is and how bad it is.

Not everybody has rot13, so they don't know what sheel negceba is.

Not because of our blue eyes

[Anonymous Coward]

They don't do this out of altruism, they have to if they want to sell their products on the EU market, since from 2006, all electronic products will have to be lead free.

Some Quotes...

[DAldredge]

"[T]he campaign of fear now being waged against genetic modification is based largely on fantasy
and a complete lack of respect for science and logic."
Greenpeace co-founder Patrick Moore.

"Solar power and windmills are not a realistic way out. Nuclear energy is the only real and practical solution, but there has been such a hysterical reaction to it."
James Lovelock, developer of the Gaia Hypothesis.

"Extreme weather events are definitely on the decline over the last 40 years."
Dr. Madhav Khandekar, a meteorologist with 25 years experience at Environment Canada.

"They have cheated the case and I am angry about that, because that will come to our account. They use bad data, as well as for the Brent Spar as for the French nuclear tests. I am against nuclear tests, but one should use scientific, sound arguments ... Greenpeace has harmed the environmental case."
Paul Crutzen, Nobel Prize winner for his work on the ozone layer, who cancelled his Greenpeace membership.

"In truth, what the environmental community has become is a money machine"
Alfred Runte, environmental historian, board member of the National Parks Conservation Association from 1993 to 1997 and author of Yosemite, The Embattled Wilderness.

"In 2000, say World Health Organization and other studies, malaria infected over 300 million people. It killed nearly 2,000,000 - most of them in sub-Saharan Africa.
[...]
"[these deaths] are due in large part to near-global restrictions on the production, export and use of DDT.
[...]
"Where DDT is used, malaria deaths plummet. "
Paul Driessen, author of Eco-Imperialism - Green Power. Black Death. - "A former member of the Sierra Club and Zero Population Growth, he abandoned their cause when he recognized that the environmental movement had become intolerant in its views, inflexible in its demands, unwilling to recognize our tremendous strides in protecting the environment, and insensitive to the needs of billions of people who lack the food, electricity, safe water, healthcare and other basic necessities that we take for granted."

"Greenpeace is lobbying against industry plans to exclude products such as DDT from a POPs [persistent organic pollutants] phase-out."
Greenpeace annual report, 1999)

Lead

[GaussianInteger]

Actually, the earliest pencils WERE made from lead, until graphite was found to be a much better substititute. I wouldn't nitpick, but I think the above nitpicking gives me more than ample justification =). http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lead

Re:A nice start, but...

[Anonymous Coward]

Paper capacitors and PCBs ? Geez, we're not talking about ENIAC's motherboard here. :-)

Capacitors on modern surface mount motherboards are either ceramic (aluminum oxide) with metal (silver, palladium, tin) layers or "dry" tantalum caps. The ones you're thinking of are probably the "wet" tantalum caps which were wetted with sulfuric acid, which is certainly unpleasant although I wouldn't call it a lethal poison.

You won't find any PCBs in the power supply transformer, either. Except in some very specialized high voltage applications, they've been banned for at least 20 years.

I have no idea what "sheel negceba" is.

Most of the lead in the environment comes from depleted lead-acid batteries, but there's no practical alternatives to those yet so tin-lead solder gets promoted to the top of the list.

The biggest concern with lead-free solders is the higher temperatures they require to make them melt. Since all of the components on the board are also subject to this higher temperature, there can be negative effects on reliability.

Re:Correct.

[Anonymous Coward]

Per unit of electricity produced.

Re:Correct.

[DAldredge]

Per KwH.

They also release a lot of heavy metals, so much so that warning about fish from lakes around most of the coal plants in East Texas have been issued due to their high levels of heavy metals.

Re:PC has met motherboards

[another_henry]

Actually solder is usually 40% lead, so it's not really a miniscule trace. I'd wager there really is quite a lot of it in motherboards and other circuit boards. I know that in the average CRT there's a kilogram or so, used to shield the user from xrays.

I'm not qualified to say how this can be safely disposed of, or whether it really needs to, but an awful lot of old electronics do end up in public landfills and other locations where they could potentially leach(sp?) into groundwater. It's something worth considering when people are upgrading their electronics and computers annually.

Re:PC has met motherboards

[madcow_ucsb]

No, it doesn't mean much for you or me, but when you start moving millions of pieces, the lead starts to add up. Yea lots of other nasties are used in the fab process, but hey, why make it worse than it needs to be?

The semiconductor company I work for has pretty high volume (nowhere near intel though...) and we went lead-free not too long ago. Customers demanded it, so we gave it to em.

Re:Correct.

[Anonymous Coward]

Which is also stupid, because most of the "waste" that comes from nuclear plants is in the form of clothing, and other consumables not directly related to the operation of the reactor (but contaminated nonetheless).

I had the opportunity to see some of the stuff that went into the big casques that go to Nevada. Pretty lame stuff. I was expecting 55 gallon barrels with glowing fluid coming out (not really, but it's more fun that way).

Not only that, but 95% of the stuff produced (yes, produced) by our fission reactors can be recycled, and reused as fuel. The rest of the 5% is in such incredible demand from academia and industry (for research) that it could make a fortune alone. Except our country is too fucking stupid (and paranoid) to recycle spent fuel.

Re:VIA is reliable

[cojsl]

Granted the KT133 was a stinker, and largely the reason early Athlons were percieved as unreliable, but since then they've been solid. I'm posting from a KT600 box, just finished a KM266 econo box, and have build dozens of other VIA based boxes including my VIA EPIA based Car Computer! [i-t-w.com]

Re:So, what is in there?

[Anonymous Coward]

There have been lead-free solder alloys available for some time. The early ones were based on bismuth, but the melting temperature was so high it tended to fry all the components on the board and even cause the boards themselves to delaminate.

The current favorites are the tin/silver/copper alloys, such as this: http://www.alphametals.com/products/solderpaste/om 338.html

Their melting ("reflow") temperature is only about 20C above the standard 63/37 tin-lead solders, so it's not too hard on the boards or components.

Believe it or not, there's a lot of science that goes into putting all those little parts on the board, melting the solder and cleaning up !

Some more quotes...

[m.koch]

"Lead Poisoning is the most common environmentally caused disease in the United States, affecting 4-5% of children nationwide."

link [biophysj.org]

"Lead poisoning is the leading environmentally induced illness in children. At greatest risk are children under the age of six because they are undergoing rapid neurological and physical development."
link [osha.gov]

"New research suggests that millions more children than previously thought might have lead-linked mental impairment, while another study supports a strong link between lead exposure and juvenile delinquency."
link [intelihealth.com]

"Lead is a highly toxic metal that was used for many years in products found in and around our homes. Lead may cause a range of health effects, from behavioral problems and learning disabilities, to seizures and death."
link [epa.gov]

... and these are just some quotes from google results [google.com].

Re:Just wondering...

[DarkMan]

The origin of the problems is typical heavy metal toxicity - lead has many available electron orbitals that can form weak bonds with proteins. At the active sites of enzymes, where there are many ligands on the protein, the heavy metal can sit in there, and bind tighter than the intended species. This essentially blocks the action of those affected enzymes. Different heavy metals have different affinities for different enzymes [0], so have different effects, but that's the general mechanism for heavy metal poisioning.

The next problem is that because the metals bind to proteins, they stay there, so that as each plant or animal is consumed, there is a concentrating action as you move up the food chain. Thus, for example, herbivourus fish might collect a small quantiy of mercury, the fish that eat them have more, and the tuna that eat those have even more. Ok, that's not lead, but I can't reacall a specific example for lead at the moment - the principle still holds. It's worth noting that the typical human diet puts them at the top of the food chain.

There is a difference between lead as a metal, and lead in a compound. It should be clear that the lead that is the problem is bioavailable lead - a solid lump of the metal might not be the biggest source of lead - although I suspect that chewing on a block of lead would be as bad, or worse than the paint.

With lead in a fish tank, I suspect that the lead forms a thin layer of an oxide or similar, that reduces the rate the metal dissolves at. This is similar to aluminum and chromium, but I think it's less efective. The small lead released would probably be less damaging to the fish that the effect of other metals (for example, iron would make the tank acidic, aluminium would make it alkaline, and so on). That's a case of minisming hard (although I'd suggest that a plastic would probably be better).

[0] Non enzyme proteins tend not have that many bindable sites, and those that do generally don't suffer much. It's principly enzyme blocking that's a problem, in general.

Re:Correct.

[AJWM]

It's per unit of power. In fact, were the extraction process easy, we'd get more energy out of coal by using its thorium content in a nuclear reactor than we do by burning the carbon. As it is, the thorium ends up as part of the coal ash (and the flue gases).

Per KWH, coal plants are far dirtier than nuke plants -- in all senses of the word "dirtier".

Re:Green Computing

[BetaJim]

CRT's don't fire any electrons at you. They would never make is out of the glass envelope (lead-free glass or not). The lead is there to shield you from the low energy x-rays produced by the electrons striking the phospher, glass and other parts of the screen.

The solder problem

[Animats]

Modern soldering practice is incredibly sophisticated. Soldering down a ball grid array surface mount package requires very tight control of the temperature and the physical properties of the solder. The components can only take soldering temperature for a short period.

The trouble with lead free solders is that they all have considerably higher melting points than lead-based solders. The "standard" lead-based solder has a melting point of 183C. The best available lead-free solders have melting points in the 220C range. That's a big jump. All the manufacturing processes have to be reworked. Some components need to be redesigned for higher soldering temperature tolerance. Some components must be repackaged in different plastics. It's not trivial.

Here's a good summary [circuitree.com] of the issues.

Re:PC has met motherboards

[descentr]

CRTs do not "use" X-rays, but they certainly produce them. In fact, Roentgen discovered X-rays specifically using a CRT. The X-rays are produced when the cathode ray strikes the glass wall or the screen itself.

Re:Lead Free is nice but...

[GigsVT]

Which means dick in the big picture.

Do you know how many watts a 200HP car engine produces in theory?

Over 149 thousand watts. Generated by a relatively inefficient small engine. Burning gasoline.

So before you go apeshit over a video card that uses 100 piddly watts, get some perspective.

Re:How to desolder the capacitors?

[GigsVT]

What, you think they'll weld them into place with copper or something?

No lead just means using a silver/tin or such solder instead of lead/tin. You can still use normal soldering equipment.

Re:PC has met motherboards

[tftp]

The X-rays are indeed produced when electrons are stopped. The energy has to go somewhere... some into phosphor, some emitted as X-rays.

However, Roentgen tubes use much higher voltages (100 kV at least) than CRTs (about 25 kV), and so the intensity of X rays is much lower. The screen itself, made of thick glass with a trace amount of lead, is sufficient to stop them. I tried to measure the radiation at the screen with a dosimeter, and got nothing except the usual ambient radiation (10 micro Roentgen / hour or so).