Green Electronics: Design and Manufacturing, by Sammy G. Shina

The environmental impact of
electronics manufacturing has become a prime concern of governments
and people everywhere. A new book written and organized by
Professor Sammy Shina, Green Electronics, Design and
Manufacturing (McGraw Hill; 2008), provides a highly practical
examination of how electronics companies can create products which
meet environmental standards.

Green Electronics is aimed
at managers and engineers; readers who seek a variety of
perspectives on how to successfully negotiate the path to a
“green” product. It is aimed at teams which seek to
develop environmentally benign materials and manufacturing
processes.

Shina spent two decades in industry
after graduating from M.I.T., and has an equally long period
teaching under his belt. He now teaches mechanical engineering at
the University of Massachusetts at Lowell. Equally to the point, he
is the founder of the New England Lead-Free Consortium, founded in
1999 and counting ~30 electronics manufacturers as members. He is,
in short, an authority on the subject who doesn’t talk down
to his readers one bit.

How To Think

The first chapters of Green
Electronics explain the scientific and mathematical
underpinning to a successful conversion to “green”
materials, products and processes, including quality and
reliability concerns. There is guidance on statistical tests that
can be applied to green materials and process selection. To weed
out the casual reader, perhaps, the book starts out with a
mini-course on statistics and sampling, with two key bits of
advice: a sample size of 30 “is usually sufficient,”
Shina advises, and testing should be spread out over different days
and times.

Shina recommends that a product
design team seeking to meet environmental standards should include
a member who is a statistician, or who has received design of
experiment (DoE) training. He provides a short course on DoE
techniques, including problem definition: how to outline the goals
of a project and define the quality characteristics of the process
or design to be optimized.

Shina and his co-authors don’t
shy away from environmental degradation issues, including the issue
that made Massachusetts (in)famous: the chemical “disposal
and leaching, with affect on city water supplies and affect on
human health.” With a view to the future, Green
Electronics outlines how to avoid those problems, including
what it takes to get away from lead-based solders.

The reader learns quite a bit about
the guts of RoHS materials, their higher processing temperatures,
and the nitty gritty of using green materials. In a chapter on
converting to lead-free assembly, contributors Robert Farrell and
Scott Mazur of Benchmark Electronics (Hudson, N. H.) describe the
conversion to RoHS compliance (lead free) as “one of the
greatest changes to the electronics assembly in over 20 years,
which exceeds the impact of the more recent conversions of
through-hole to surface mount technology (SMT), and high-pin-count
lead frame components to ball grid array packages.” The
lead-free solders require processing temperatures 30-40ºC
higher than tin/lead based solders, making hot air surface leveling
(HASL) more likely to cause thermal damage to the board.

I’ve been
reading Green Electronics bit-by-bit, moving from the
first chapters written by Prof. Shina to the seven chapters
contributed by managers from a variety of well-known electronics
companies, most of them based in the northeast area of the United
States.. Every author contributed with passion and clarity, and the
net effect is that the reader learns not only how to design a
“green” product, but gains broad insights how to
conduct a modern product engineering project that happens to have
an environmentally-sound product as the end result.