Over the next few years manufacturers producing medical devices or monitoring and control instrumentation will need to bring their products into compliance with the EU RoHS directive, as they are in Category 8 or Category 9 respectively, of the scope. In this article I will discuss some of the "lessons learned" by the other eight categories (1-7 and 10) as well as the implications of being "late to the party".
Complying with RoHS today from a dead stop should generally be a far easier task than it was for manufacturers a decade ago, when it was entirely new. Today the supply chain has almost entirely converted to RoHS compliance to such an extent that it has become quite difficult to produce a non-compliant product…as long as that product is within the original scope of the RoHS directive.
Products in Categories 8 and 9 are, in fact, often quite different from the rest of the categories both in terms of customer base and, more importantly, supply base. While there is certainly a good degree of supply base overlap, particularly in the standard off-the-shelf components and technologies used by medical devices and instrumentation products, there are segments of the supply base that cater to the often very complex and technically demanding – not to mention low volume – properties of these products. They, as well as your own internal team, may not have nearly the knowledge and expertise of RoHS that the mainstream electronics supply chain does.
