HERNDON, VA - Saying industry "must have means of differentiating RoHS-compliant products," a leading industry consortium today called for the use of unique part numbers for such parts.

 The International Electronics Manufacturing Initiative says the majority of its OEM and EMS members "strongly support" the change. In a statement, iNEMi said:

 "Demonstrating and certifying compliance with RoHS is a complex undertaking made more difficult by the electronics industry's distributed design and manufacturing supply chains and the incompatibility between the current tin-lead (SnPb) and RoHS-compliant lead-free manufacturing processes. Industry must have means of differentiating RoHS-compliant products that is common across all of the companies involved in, or contributing to, product manufacture, including component suppliers, component distributors, EMS providers, OEMs and their design partners. We are convinced that the only practical way to accomplish this goal is through separate part numbers that can clearly identify RoHS compliance and manufacturing process compatibility.

 iNEMI said support for the switch comes from Alcatel, Celestica, Cray, Dell, Delphi,  HP, Intel, Jabil Circuit, Lucent, Microsoft, Plexus, Sanmina-SCI, Solectron, StorageTek and Sun Microsystems.

"Many of our members feel very strongly about this issue, and they came to us, asking that iNEMI issue a position statement to go on record as supporting separate part numbers," said Jim McElroy, executive director and CEO of iNEMI.  iNEMI supplied statements from several members supporting the position.

"Celestica is a strong supporter of the introduction of new part numbers for RoHS-compliant components," said Dan Shea, chief technology officer, Celestica. "By assigning unique part numbers for compliant parts, global suppliers would greatly support proper component segregation and handling - driving a smoother transition to RoHS compliance for the electronics industry as a whole."

According to Vivek Gupta, program manager for Intel's Assembly Technology Division, "Intel requires its suppliers to change part numbers when they transition to RoHS-compliant parts and follow the established change control process.  Suppliers are expected to mark their RoHS-compliant products per established JEDEC/IPC standards and implement controls to prevent mixing of RoHS-compliant parts."