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IC Failures Linked to Resin Series?
MEW writes "According to this article, 'the semiconductor industry began using red phosphorus as a flame retardant instead of the Br-based compound it had used for years,' due to environmental concerns. By July 2002, 1000 tons of the stuff was used for about a billion chips, when they stopped due to high component failures. In particular Sumitomo Bakelite caused rampant failures in Fujitsu disk drives. There's still a lot of Sumitomo Bakelite out there, and we may see the worst of it soon, as components start to fail prematurely. This was posted by Spaceman on Macintouch who says that the bad material accounts for 'half the world's supply of 'IC Plastics'' and can result in 'sudden or premature end of life.'"
red phoshorous as a flame retardend??? it always burned quite nicely when I used to play with it...
the most sexp i get is my paren-mode.
... for the cheap, shoddy crap we have come to know and love.
No its not that its a badly designed lump of shit - its caused by the resin - really it is!
You can't expect to wield supreme executive power, just because some watery tart threw a sword at you
It's strange to read that, since the Digital-Analog converter on my video card apparently has died this morning when my computer turned on.
:(
On the plus side to this premature failure, Slashdot now looks extremely trippy... Those green bars keep blinking magenta!
The down side is the contrast for text is really bad...
Pereant, inquit, qui ante nos nostra dixerunt.
"Confound those who have said our remarks before us."
...most hard disk manufacturers have reduced their warrenties from 3-years to 1-year in the not so distant past?
Any fool can talk, but it takes a wise man to listen.
Perhaps, just perhaps this was already known when the products were made/shipped.
You cant believe that this wasn't tested before it was decided upon. They must have known the devices would fail prematurely, just after warranties expire.. If they didn't, then the engineers were not doing their jobs.
Great way to get people to have to upgrade, when their existing equipment goes up in smoke in front of them.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
IC's are dying
"What use is power to the Keeps of Balance?" -Disnt of Nightmare LpMud
...Does that mean if my chips glow red in the dark then its a bad thing?
Perhaps I need one of those heat-sink thingies.
*--BigMan--- Time flies like an arrow.. but personally I prefer a nice glass of wine!
So they changed the material due to environmental reasons, but as it turns out, this new material produces a lot of unnecessary electronic waste that's pretty hard to recycle. That sucks.
-- Power corrupts, but PowerPoint corrupts absolutely.
first the leaky capacitors, now this. any way to find out exactly what this material went into? like a list of manufacturers using it? i bet not right! btw this was published in December 2002.
This is my Sig, this is my Gun. One is for Slashdot and one is for Fun.
It's not good that a large number of components will be failing due to bad materials used, but it had to happen sooner or later. How many manufacturers are there for TFT displays? Laptops? Production of these parts is central to just a few very large manufacturing plants to save costs, and the "brands" just put the sticker (HP, Acer, Fujitsu, Samsung, you name it) and sell them at whatever price they want to charge.
So, now it seems like one of them was using some cheaper/environmentally friendlier crap in the manufacturing process and it's coming back to bite everyone's butts. Surprise surprise!
---- Take the Space Quiz!
If the fault is theirs, wouldn't anyone with a warranty be able to demand a replacement?
G
This is very interesting! Maybe all of those burnt out powersupplies I've seen (with blown ICs) may not be a resault of blown caps, but rather the cause. Hmmmm
Of course, I've seen some nasty leaky caps too.
Life is not for the lazy.
The Politically correct change in chemistry results in more equipment in landfills not less!
This is almost as funny as all those dimbulbs who choose paper over plastic "to protect the enviroment" even though their paper probably used chemicals that polluted water, and the paper probably came from some asian rainforest.
hey you never know ;)
Click here to see what happen when you hit Red Phosphorus
I make my face look like this and concerned words come out.
Just remember that everything carries a cost, including radical environmentalism. If you support making policy solely on the basis of someone's fears, then you'd better not whine when those policies cost you money, as they did in this case. Remember that saving the earth doesn't happen for free, and when you raise costs for those "greedy corporations," they just pass their cost right onto you, the consumer.
[ home ]
I have seen some pretty funny comments on this story, and some pretty interesting ones as well. Reading this story made me really wonder about some things.
;) )
If this problem is as pervasive as it seems, exactly WHAT components are effected? I mean, think about this, how many of these plastics have found their way into things like Ventilators, internal defibrillators, external defibrillators like the LifePak series that is so prevalant on ambulances and in hospitals world wide?
What about the machines that control your money in the bank (if you use such a thing as quaint as a bank
Vehicle computers? or even... ACK, my PS2 and GameCube?!?!?!?
Anyway, beyond hard disk controllers, I got the idea that there were a lot of different ICs effected here, which could explain a lot of problems, and could cause some pretty bad problems as well.
"Our funds have never taken part in toxic or death spiral convertible financings of any sort" -BayStar's managing partne
It's not the "sudden" part that bugs me -- electronics that croak usually do so in an instantaneous manner -- it's just the "premature" part.
Here's an idea, rather than trying to sound like a lawyer, just say "chips stop working years before they're supposed to."
Keep your Potassium chlorate away from your motherboard! :-)
or you may have some explaining to do.
If you can read this sig - the bitch fell off.
So now we not only need to deal with bad components and stupid designs, but even the components of the components are bad.
This really has to say something about society. A lot like the light bulbs in Forward the Foundation. Just how much useless, broken crap does the world need?
And your statement yet again propagates the myth that the world needs "saving". How conceited we are to think that anything we do to this planet, a planet that has seen near extinction of every species serveral times, would be of consequence. The human species has only existed for a blink of an eye in the life of this planet. The human race may someday need saving, probably from itself, but don't shed a tear for the planet.
"God fights on the side with the best artillery." - Napoleon, Marshal of France - speaking truth to power
I've also suffered when my otherwise great and very silent Fujitsu HDD went down last year. I've read about the expected rise in Fujitsu's HDDs death ratio, so I had backed up all my sensitive data before my drive went down.
By the way, I got it fixed afterwards. I'm not too much into technical details when it comes to microelectronics, but it cost me close to nothing compared with the cost of a new drive. I still bought a new one, actually, just to be sure, and I occasionally use my old Fujitsu drive to move large quantities of data between offices.
If that switching was the reason for companies to drop their warranty period to just one year, it's bad again -- doesn't it mean that HDDs are now expected to die sooner? I've had a 4GB Seagate drive on my 24/7 routing machine for five years now and I'm not sure I'll be able to find a new drive this small so that the router's old motherboard could handle it. And I'm certainly not up to buying new hardware every once a month.
___
On Slashdot, Russians comment on YOU!
The foam on the last space shuttle was used because it was more environmentally friendly, even though it was inferior. At least that's what I read (just put 'space shuttle foam environment' into google). I'm not saying that all involved can see the consequences of their actions. But millions of electronics failing doesn't seem environmentally friendly either. People need to study and balance concerns. The key thing that equals health is money. We're all for a clean environment. But after a certain point there are diminishing returns which aren't worth the investment.
Oh wait, we don't manufacture anything in the US anymore. Well, bully for everyone else.
"Learning is not compulsory... neither is survival."
--Dr.W.Edwards Deming
Peeps, I understand that there is a lot of hysteria and piss-poor science out there about the impact we have. For instance, the crying about beer bottles and 'littering' of that sort. Guess what? A bottle is just a funny-shaped rock, to nature.
OTOH, there are impacts we have on the environment that have real dangers attached to them - specifically chemical ones. Everyone yells about the rainforest and connects it to free oxygen - but that's not the truth, is it? 97% of the earth's free oxygen is released by phytoplankton in the top 12 inches of the ocean. This area is also the very base of the food chain.
All it would take is for one coastal factory to dump some complex chemical enzym or catalyst into the ocean and it could be all over but the shouting and bleeding. We could wipe out all life on land and the earth would recover; kill the ocean, and we're done for.
Thinking outside my Head
+1 conspiracy theory
All right. You blame the large corporations. I'll blame the environmentalists. It's a good thing there are always so many people to blame when things go wrong.
They just show up somewhere else in the supply chain. Thanks to the grey market this stuff will be around for years.
I believe the same problems occured with the two space shuttle crashes. In the first one, the O-Ring sealant was changed to remove asbestos. This sealant became brittle during very cold weather. In the second case, the material sprayed on the main fuel tank was changed to remove CFCs. The result was poor adhesion. These facts were reported and known as well as the decreased reliability. However, it didn't appear PC to report them to the general public - Geccie.
The foam on the last space shuttle was used because it was more environmentally friendly, even though it was inferior. At least that's what I read (just put 'space shuttle foam environment' into google).
I expect you read this article in Capitalist Magazine. The title of the article, "Earth Worshippers Cause Death in Space", really brings home the high levels of dispassionate reporting and journalistic integrity enjoyed by the magazine. Truly, everything they say must be true.
Tubal-Cain smokes the white owl.
No, that wasn't the original article I read. But the overall point, even if the foam story is not true, stands. Protecting the environment at all costs or making environmental decisions without studying impact isn't smart and can be dangerous. We saved the environment but ended up killing thousands of people?
The world according to slashdot:
If I break it, it's an accident.
If you break it, you're a moron.
If a corporation breaks it, it's a conspiracy.
Mod down posts with a "Free Mac Mini/iPod" sig, they're spam!
They should have used Red Mercury !
The Bigger The Headache The Bigger the Pill
Because you have a different ideological slant, you attack the source rather than the points made. You're the other side of the same tiresome coin.
Rubbish. If a Columbian drug baron tells me that cocaine should be supplied to children, it is perfectly germane for me to question their motives for making the assertion, irrespective of whether the assertion has merit or not.
Tubal-Cain smokes the white owl.
Now they say they'll be replacing the red phosphorus with red kryptonite. Just who's behind this, anyway?
--- Ban humanity.
I can safely say there is no red Phosphorus in any of my computer hardware. I have experienced exceptional reliability in all computer components and rate the chance of me experiencing any sudden failure as extrem-!@#
---
Any man who can drive safely while kissing a pretty girl is simply not giving the kiss the attention it deserves. -- AE
I have seen many comments here about environmental fanatics who won't look at the scientific facts, and in the end we get lots of wasted electronics in landfills. An Anonymous Coward especially talked about "billions of ruined components in landfills".
9 /107p643- 648sjodin/sjodin-full.html
First of all, the reason many European countries have limited or banned the use of certain flame retardants is that these chemicals are not released only in fires, but in everyday use of electronics. They show up in the blood of office workers, and especially high concentrations in people working with electronic recycling, and they also show up in nature:
http://ehpnet1.niehs.nih.gov/members/199
Note that the article ends by saying not that the industry will go back to using the old materials, but that they will try to develop other alternatives than this failed one.
Second, we don't know for sure that this "mass failure" of electronics will occur. Some of the right wingers who are screaming about the cost and are fond of quoting the junkscience site seem to be taking this mass failure as a fact, like it already happened. Who are jumping to conclusions now?
Third, even if the new material leads to product failure, why only blame environmentalists, how about Sumitomo developers?
Being bitter is drinking poison and hoping someone else will die
instead of the Br-based compound it had used for years,' due to environmental concerns. By
Very good memetic work. What are we to learn here? Listening to Environmental concerns lead to bad products. But wouldnt it be more correct to blame the industry's poor choice of substitute instead of trying to infer that making Environmentally necessary changes lead to failure?
using toxic substances in industry is not an option. The real problem is their bad solution to change.
The original point was still good, that ignorant environmentalism in one fell swoop can cause around half a billion premature device failures in which can be included all the environmental costs of making replacement devices proportioned over the missing lifespan of the failed products.
The problem is, of course, the ignorance, not the environmentalism, but it goes to show that being aware of just the "environment" isn't enough to make decisions on.
Sam
blog.sam.liddicott.com
Constructing a straw man and attacking it hardly makes you look any better.
And confusing a straw man with an analogy hardly makes you look any more justified in your original accusation.
Tubal-Cain smokes the white owl.
"The down side is the contrast for text is really bad."
The content of the text isn't that great either.
Not that I'm an expert on this kind of thing, but it seems to me that the components of an IC would only really pose an environmental risk if they were exposed to the elements for a long time, or ended up being melted down at a chinese screwdriver-shop.
Which, incidentally, is what happens to a large percentage of so-called "recycled" computers.
-3Suns
~~~~
The Revolution will be Slashdotted
Is there a list of products/manufacturers that have parts out ther ethat contain this material?
It would be good to start collecting a list of known devices and models that are subject to this otherwise undetectable manufacturing defect.
comment directly in my journal
Any idea how I'd find out if these had ICs on them made using this stuff? I've seem 3 or 4 of them die with no obvious damage, and although I said it'd be the last time I bought Abit, maybe I should reconsider if this is the reason?
A baseless accusation of racism or sexism will cause mighty "Evil Corporations" to bend backwards and cave.School curicula are dumbed down and all offending material removed."Mainstream media",corporate business,higher education are all owned by the PC movement.
Red phosphorus is mixed with the packaging resin, which encases chip die and lead frame. It's about 2-3% of that black plastic.
Apparently red phospherus enables an internal short, probably by reacting with the resin to make a carbon channel. This is my best guess, given the info we have.
The majority of US chip companies these days are just design labs. They hire Asian chip foundries to actually render their designs to product, and it appears that they are the manufacturer. More and more the large chipmakers are doing this too -- farming out production. This new process would be used on commodity chips first, like logic and memory. Unlikely to be in high-end chips like processors, A/D, etc.
Some here deride the environmental reasoning for the change. It's pretty stupid to not care about dioxin, no matter where it is. These Exxon fascists would also say that global warming is a myth, because it's cold today... well it's warmer than it was 20 years ago. In about 30 years, you'll be paying for dikes to protect New York and Los Angeles from being flooded, ignorant bastard. Weather will be erratic and catastrophic. But that's not your problem today, now is it? Anti-environmental/anti-intellectual clods should be the ones who suffer for their short-sighted ignorant views, not the world as a whole. But unfortunately that's not how things work.
Campaign finance reform is national security.
Heck, my blood is perpetually brown since that project where I lived for 3 months on espresso and sandwiches. And of course, office workers at SCO have green blood from breathing the same air as Demonic Darl.
--
Mad science! Robots! Underwear! Cute girls! Full comic online! http://www.girlgeniusonline.com/
My wife is a Criminal Prosecutor for the state and I sometimes help her with her cases.*
Red Phosphorous is used in most of the Meth labs around here...
This may explain the 'sudden or premature end of life.'
-AC
* I'm not a lawyer but I help by listening to her arguments to see if they make sense to a layman.
For what it's worth, the folks arguing about environmental impact of the new vs. the old resin are missing a big part of the picture. The costs in time and replacement to organizations is a lot more than just buying a part.
To use the Fujitsu drives for example. Data lost on a failed drive has a value and may be non recoverable. Most places don't do daily backups, but even the changes in data over 24 hours can be significant and add the cost of the employee's salary in time in recreating the data. Replacement of drives known defective and not failed costs in time for data transfer and drive replacement in addition to purchase and validation of new drives. After the drive is replaced if it contains sensitive data it has to be disassembled and destroyed properly. After all that it makes it to the landfill.
Figure it this way:
$30 - 1 hour (failed) attempted data recovery
$60 - cost of replacement drive
$30 - 1 hour installation and reghosting of new drive
$100 - 4 hours recreating lost data
$15 - 30 min manual destruction of old drive
=$235
-$60 assume reimbursement for drive (not guaranteed)
=$175 because it was defective material!
Multiply that by the Fujitsu disaster (one and a half dumpster loads of drives after destruction, as I remember) and the cost gets up there. Remember, you may get the cost of the drive back, eventually, but never the cost of your labor.
Oh yeah, and you're still filling up the landfill.
It doesn't matter what you wrap your emotions around, Reality is a brick wall specifically designed to scramble eggs
Sumitomo Bakelite
Bakelite? Is this the same stuff they made ugly household items out of in the 1920s? Now that's high-tech! Since we're using space age materials, why not just encase the ICs in granite?
Justin
"Why would God give us a waist if we wasn't supposed to rest our pants on it?" - Rev. Roy McDaniels
I'm going to go out of my way to buy Fujitsu when I can. The fact that they can figure out the root cause of a new type of failure so quickly is very impressive. They should be commended.
A programmer is a machine for converting coffee into code.
And confusing a straw man with an analogy hardly makes you look any more justified in your original accusation. LOL
BTW, Sharon is now perpetrating a 'kinder, gentler' genocide on the Palestinians, economic retardation being his most egregious repression. And, he is destroying Israel in the process.
Campaign finance reform is national security.
No, it's byproducts of manufacture, that's the problem. (dioxin)
Campaign finance reform is national security.
Here in the UK we coat everything in tons of bromine based flame retardants, particularly things like sofas. More so than almost any other country in the world.
Stops fires, but believed by a lots of scientists to cause liver and kidney damage, and birth defects.
Of course, it still saves far more people than it kills, but there are less toxic alternatives that are just as effective, but sadly more expensive.
Seriously... I've started to put RAID in all my computers, from linux boxen to vanilla windows desktops.
I did this to my wife's win2k box a year ago, and she groused at me for monkeying around with her computer... until the Western Digital drive I purchased to put in that RAID (slightly over a year ago, heh...) noisily died yesterday. When I explained that we would have lost everything if not for the RAID I'd installed, she immediately became much more understanding.
But... that's the state of data storage these days.
Even if a man chops off your hand with a sword, you still have two nice, sharp bones to stick in his eyes.
I did a little back-of-the-envelope calculation last week on data security. Basically, if you want secure data, you have to dedicate at least 2GB for every 1Gb of data that you are not willing to lose. More realistic is a 3:1 figure.
2:1 backup to a 2nd disk (10Gb+10Gb), protection against corruption, accidental/malicious deletion/changes or primary disk failure, but requires rebuild of the system.
2.2:1 RAID5 and backup to a 2nd disk (2Gbx6+10Gb), protection against disk failure, still no protection against corruption / deletion / changes, 2.4:1 if you have a hot-spare
3:1 RAID1 and backup to a 2nd disk (10Gb+10Gb, 10Gb), same as RAID5 solution, just a bit less efficient
5.4:1 RAID5 w/ backup to (3) rotated backup drives (2Gbx6+hotspare, 10Gbx3), closest to full security
And of course, all of that ignores the usage of various removable media types (tape / DVD-R) for archival storage, which is a different calculation.
And yes, I know that I could double the cost by buying a second drive to mirror the first, but doing that is noisy and hot. And I'd still have to replace one every times one fails.
Your data, your choice, but I don't think you'd find a 5400 rpm quiet drive to be noisy and hot. 5400rpm drives are great for external USB cases. And typically, the models with 8Mb cache have the 3 year warranty instead of the 1 year warranty on the 2Mb cache models.
Wolde you bothe eate your cake, and have your cake?
Is this intended to be some kind of flame?
...who gives a fuck? You don't mind killing bacteria...why do you mind killing other forms of life?
Blar.
The classic example of this was the conversion of the basic "hamburger box" by McDonalds....
... "The manufacturing process uses other resources, too--one study estimates that manufacturing a Styrofoam clamshell uses 30 percent less energy, and generates 46 percent less air pollution and 42 percent less water pollution, than does manufacturing a paperboard box."
"In November 1990 the McDonald's Corporation, largely in response to pressure from the public and from environmental groups, made the decision to replace Styrofoam "clamshell" hamburger containers with paperboard boxes."
Not to mention the paper box insulates poorly, requiring more heat-lamp energy; and because paper has to be treated to repel grease, it decomposes slower than normal paper, and could not be recycled like the plastic-based styrofoam could.
This is at least the industry's second major embarrassment in as many years. Anyone remember the leaking capacitors? Widely deploying a new material without first testing it is akin to making major changes to a production piece of software and shipping it as soon as you get it to compile. Worse, even, because hardware isn't so easily "patched," and is much more likely to find its way into systems (i.e. automotive controllers) whose failure can actually kill people. If I were a buyer for an IC manufacturer, Sumitomo would have just earned itself a position atop my "never, ever do business with again" list. What they've done is terrible for their industry, as well as the multitude of other high-tech industries that depend on them.
If you find a way to make a cpu out of wood, don't do it.
Who modded this flamebait? It happens to be absolutely correct about burning plant matter being a major source of dioxins, and about the ice cream. IMHO the last paragraph is a little too polite, otherwise spot on.
Oh no... it's the future.
In particular Sumitomo Bakelite caused rampant failures in Fujitsu disk drives. There's still a lot of Sumitomo Bakelite out there, and we may see the worst of it soon, as components start to fail prematurely.
Conveniently, I first read "Bakelite" as "Bukkake."
I'm not saying we could wipe off every bacterium on Earth, but we could certainly disrupt the biological system enough to make it incapable of sustaining humans. And in the end, that's all that matters, isn't it?
ehhh, whatever - i suspect the planet would be better off without humans crawling all over it. i love how environmentalists fly off the handle when i point out they're actually interested in the survival of humanity, not the ecosystem...
Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored. - Aldous Huxley
Larry Niven described the downfall of the exalted Ringworld Engineers, and the decay of their cosmic triumph, the Ringworld, due to a GM bacterium which ate their superconducting plastic wiring. Perhaps we're finally getting powerful enough to scare the Puppeteers! Kzinti will be right around the corner.
--
make install -not war
this thing needs a HYPE campaign.
"The direction controls are the same in Nethack as they are in vi." "Yeah, I hardly ever die in vi anymore."
I've read many comments here blaming "hippie tree huggers" for this problem. The line of reasoning seems to go that if environmentalists hadn't insisted on a more environmentally-friendly substance, then this problem never would have happened. A corollary to this argument says that even more environmental damage will be done due to the premature failure of millions of devices which are then discarded, than would have been done by the original substance had it been used. The suggestion is that environmentalists are stupid and brought this on themselves.
I think this is a stupid argument. Obviously NO ONE knew that this substance would have this problem, or it wouldn't have been used. Would anyone have pushed for using the new substance over the old had they known that it would have had this problem? Of course not. Can you blame environmentalists for pushing for what looked like a more environmentally friendly, yet equally as robust and useful substance, as was previously used? Even when NO ONE was able to predict that the new substance would have a kind of failure that was never seen before?
If you are going to assign "blame" for this problem, assign it to the engineers who failed to understand this new substance well enough to foresee that this would happen. Obviously everyone thought this new stuff would work just fine or otherwise it wouldn't have been put in. You can't blame environmentalists for not knowing MORE about materials science than the materials scientists themselves.
Walmart's business is 2.5% of US GDP, 40% of all retail trade. Walmart drives the trend for lower retail paysales and more part time employment, as well as the trend for consumer product manufacturers to move ops overseas. When people save 5-10% at Walmart, they are reducing the circulation of money in the US, which depresses the economy as a whole. Soon, the money saved to buy something else never gets earned in the first place, leading to further drops in prices and wages.
Consider that most people are capable of figuring out what's in their own best interests. If a Wal-Mart wasn't a Good Thing for most people, most people wouldn't shop there, and the company would be bankrupt.
Exactly, their own best interest at the moment of purchase . For most goods, people shop on price without any consideration for the larger consequences. Only when we buy consumer durable (a frig, washer, car) does quality vs. price come into play, and consumers almost never consider the effect on anyone else. That's what macro economics is built on, the almost completely self-absorbed economic decisions of individuals.
Luke, help me take this mask off
I actually saw the issue on systems in my company and, boy, diagnozing that crap was a complete pain in the neck.
The flame-retardant mechanism is that when the part catches fire, the phosphorus burns first and starves the fire of oxigen. The resin heats up, melts and seals the whole crap. It may seem bizarre but it atually works.
The problem : the package can crack under mechanical stress and water can sip in the part (ambient humidity). Water + phosphorus -> electrolyte (phosphoric acid). If it happens somewhere on the part (in general on the die pads) where there is a strong static electrical field (think ground-power pair), it causes electrolytic migration. It can create a conductive bridge. In usual english, you call that a short. And then, duh, the part doesn't work anymore.
Where it can get really fun is that those parasitic conductive bridges are not so conductive. Just enough to cause a problem. They are also resistive enough to dissipate a bit of heat and melt away when a current flows through it. Oh, cute! A fuse! So the problem goes away when the fuse blows up. Except that then the electrolytic migration starts again until it creates a bridge and then shorts the part again and then blows up again, etc, etc.
The process for that crap takes days or weeks. Needless to say that's a very unusual timescale for electronic engineers, who are more used to nanseconds and picoseconds. To figure out what was going on, it took us nearly a year of RMAs and very pissed off customers.
I hate Sumitomo. I really hate them.
SNS Not Sig
I think you may have missed the point of the "broken window fallacy" examples. What I'm stating is a case of "hidden cost", which the Wikipedia article you reference defines as "Because the costs are hidden, there is an illusion that the benefits cost nothing." Within Walmart's business practices are the hidden costs: a strong deflationary cycle that removes more value from the overall system than it gains for Walmart's stockholders and employees. I stand by my assertion that in essence the $5 you save now are going to have a future cost of - say - $10.
Luke, help me take this mask off
I have a great big stack of S-100 cards from the 70s with a fair number of 7400 series TTL chips on them that use ceramic packaging. Granted, those aren't surface mount SOIC packages, but they're built like little tanks and they all still work fine. Given the chemical complexities and environmental concerns with using plastics for the packaging of chips, have any manufacturers gone back and looked at the costs of applying some of the older tried-and-true packaging methods to the newer smaller packages?
The "icebergs will melt and cause massive flooding" theory is total junk. Since the great "Eureka!" moment, displacement has been pretty basic to understand. The water levels will not rise if icebergs melt, because they are displacing the same volume of water already, or even less (remember, water is the only liquid that has greater volume in its frozen state).
I dunno, it seems that if both shuttles failed due to materials failures -right on schedule- that the design worked just as it was supposed to. Also, if it was a materials failure, that means it wasn't a procedure nor operator nor process failure, so that's pretty good. Topic-morph: What really concerns me about the Shuttle program is that I can remember back when the first gliding tests were being done some of the aerospace and aviation journals mentioned two things that are *very* interesting but seemed to have been lost to time: 1. The Shuttle design has always included an ejectable crew compartment. The structure is still there in the skeleton. However, to save cost and increase the payload capacity slightly, the ejection mechanisms were removed and with them the capablity. Have you noticed that in both shuttle failures the crew cabin remained intact longer than anything else and were you disturbed by the reports of how long the crew survived after the disintegrations? Granted, the ejection was only for use during the slow part of takeoff, but if it could be used at any other unforeseeable time... 2. NASA released a facinating report regarding the solid rocket boosters. Each puts large amounts of...Chlorine into the upper atmosphere where it can do the most harm. But it's cheaper than liquid fuel. The estimates, by NASA at the time, were that the ozone layer could be depleted by booster-Chlorine alone after another 200 launches...guess how many there have been?