National Instruments has released several products that now comply with the NI Hazardous Substances Reduction initiative, furthering the company's commitment to meeting high environmental standards
This NI initiative is a voluntary programme modelled after the European Union Restriction of the Use of Certain Hazardous Substances (RoHS) directive, which restricts the use of harmful substances such as lead, mercury and cadmium in new equipment.
A newly compliant instrument control system and a data acquisition system are the first RoHS-compliant National Instruments products released in 2006.
The specific products include the PCI-GPIB high-performance plug-and-play IEEE 488 interface, GPIB-ENET/100 high-performance ethernet-to-GPIB controller, PCI-6289 M Series data acquisition board, SHC68-68-EPM high-performance shielded cable and SCC-68 high-performance terminal block.
With these new products, engineers and scientists can build systems that meet future environmental requirements.
NI also offers RoHS-compliant GPIB interface chips.
"National Instruments is committed to releasing environmentally friendly products to benefit not only the environment but also our customers and employees," said Stefanie Breyer, the RoHS programme manager for National Instruments.
"We will continue to release RoHS-compliant products during and after 2006".
The European Union RoHS directive restricts the use of lead, mercury, cadmium, hexavalent chromium, polybrominated biphenyls (PBB) or polybrominated diphenyl ethers (PBDE) in new electrical and electronic equipment put on the market in the European Union after 1 July 2006.
The RoHS directive applies to eight categories of electrical and electronic equipment but excludes products in Category 9, Monitoring and Control Instruments, under which NI products fall.
