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.'"

Comments

Is this why...

[AccUser]

...most hard disk manufacturers have reduced their warrenties from 3-years to 1-year in the not so distant past?

Re:Is this why...

[dave-tx]

That's a good question, but I think the reduction in warranty is related more to the economics of the hard drive market. Drives have become SO inexpensive now that it's not feasible for the manufacturer to warranty them for three years. If they kept the 3 year warranty, I doubt we'd be seeing the 2GB/$1 we're seeing now.

Not that I'm defending the reduction in warranty, of course. I'm mad as hell that I've had many drives go bad in less than two years of service.

Re:Is this why...

[EvilTwinSkippy]

It all comes back to the wal-mart conundrum. At some point the price reductions we demand from manufacturers starts to cost indirectly more that we are saving on the sticker price.

With Wal-Mart they tend to employ a fraction of the people that a similarly sized retailer would, at a much lower wage. They also tend to drive other local retailers out of business, thus fewer people are employed for less money, lowering the Domestic Product for that community. In the case of a SuperWalmart, they also tend to depress the spending power of SEVERAL communities.

In this case hard drives have become so "cheap" that we end up buying them at twice or 3 times the rate. Add it up, are we saving that much money?

Re:Is this why...

[Jahf]

Actually, while you're right about Wal-Mart being worse than Target, K-Mart, etc, the points you raise are effects of their policy to keep prices low, not the -cause- of why they have low prices.

Wal-Mart's practices are there because they need them to retain their low price leadership in an economy that has adapted to WM's first round of low price wars.

You also don't mention the biggest key to WM's forced price lowering ... they are such a larger part of the economy that they are able to -force- manufacturers to sell at lower prices to WM that to other retailers. They have literally caused companies to move offices from across the country to Arkansas so that the companies can more efficiently "negotiate with" (read: cower in front of) WM. WM sets the hours and often has unofficial hiring authority over these Arkansan satellite offices. NO other retailer has ever had that kind of power.

However, even that is not the -cause-. The cause is the willingness of most Americans to sacrifice their community retailers and specialty chains for lower prices and "all under one roof" shopping, even if as a whole the selection of products is lower. That short sighted view in the end causes the community as a whole to lose value (monetarily as well as socially), making Wal-Mart the ONLY long-term winner in that situation.

The answer is as simple as telling an overweight person to diet and exercise ... people have to stop low-price gouging and shopping at the cheapest possible place. And it is just as hard to -convince- a person of that as it is to convince them to stick to a diet.

BTW, yes it is true that K-Mart and Target -started- the concepts on a nationwide scale. However they never abuse their position (possibly because they never attained a position as strong as WM) like WM has.

Economics will eventually right the situation, but the damage that will have been done by that point (which won't occur until WM has completely exhausted it's growth capacity AND product development has stagnated due to lack of competition) will be horrendous to everyone's standard of living.

BTW, if you shop at "Sam's", you shop at Wal-Mart. Got a Costco or similar non-Sam's wholesaler? Go there.

Damn the irony!

[locknloll]

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.

Just remember that everything carries a cost

[squarooticus]

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.

Re:Just remember that everything carries a cost

[Red Rocket]

...everything carries a cost, including radical environmentalism.

As does radical industrialism. Polluting the planet willy-nilly just so someone can make a buck has a huge cost but, unfortunately, that cost is not included in the price of the manufactured goods. The manufacturer has thus found a way to privatize the profits while he socializes the cost. It's one of the ways that our form of capitalism has become distorted from a sustainable form of capitalism. All costs should be included in the price of the product or it's not really capitalism.

Re:Just remember that everything carries a cost

[Skjellifetti]

You are right, but measuring the economic cost of environmental degradation is a real difficult problem for two reasons. First, since few environmental goods are traded in marketplaces, it is hard to get the required price/quantity data that would enable us to measure the demand curves for environmental goods(*) and, thus, the cost or amount of compensation individuals would require in order to tolerate a given quantity of environmental degradation. This is based on the idea that if a tree falls in a forest and nobody gives a damn, is its loss really a cost? The second problem is defining how we should aggregate these individual costs. One rich enviromentalist (with a high demand for environmental goods) could swamp the (perhaps negative) demand by many poor people without jobs. Should many poor folks go without jobs in order to satisfy the desires of a few rich folks for a high quality environment? If I read the anti-globalization types correctly, they essentially say yes, while the pro globalization folks seem willing to ignore the environmental problems completely. There is a "correct" balance in there somewhere, but calculating precisely where is hardly an exact science.

* Disclaimer: I used to do this for a living.

Premature component failure in healthcare...

[emtboy9]

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.

Great...

[EvilTwinSkippy]

No better way to jumpstart the economy than to make people go out and re-buy all the expensive high-end components they...

Oh wait, we don't manufacture anything in the US anymore. Well, bully for everyone else.

Re:Intentional or Accidental?

[fish waffle]

You cant believe that this wasn't tested before it was decided upon.

Conspiracy theories are by nature unassailable. However, according to the article there is a simple reason why it wasn't tested, and that is that it was an unexpected effect, for which there was no test:

Most equipment and IC manufacturers perform reliability tests when adopting new encapsulation materials, and when shipping or receiving components. Even so, almost no problems were found at all this time, because this type of problem has never been experienced before. As one manufacturer commented, "This is the first example of this failure mode in the world. It's something that cannot be detected by existing reliability tests."

Motivations

[HeghmoH]

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.

Re:The hilarious irony

[Dogtanian]

the 'politically correct' movement

Has there ever been a 'politically correct' movement of substantial size? Unlikely.

The expression was appopriated as a lazy and hollow (but effective) smear against anything the right wing don't like.

Want to gain easy points? Accuse your opponent/the thing you dislike of being 'politically incorrect' and for *absolutely no cost* you get to become the heroic figure making a lone stand against the forces of communism, or whatever.

It's clever, because you don't have to debate the specifics of your argument. There's a good bit about this technique here (see 'Viso Sciolto').

However, since it permeated the mainstream so extensively, 'Politically Correct' has tended to be used by people who are lazy and/or stupid, like the celebrity chef who was cooking something with cream, and pointed out that "I know it's politically incorrect, but.. yadda yadda".

No, it's your choice. If you want to guzzle 5 pints of cream a day, and die of obesity or whatever, that's your problem.

Of course, then you can sue the cream makers. Genius! You get to play the "don't tell me what I can and can't do" card for years, and when the consequences of your actions hit, you can whine and blame the food-makers for not protecting you.

Personally, I'd rather see junk-food manufacturers sued for advertising shitty food to kids or making misleading claims.

Environmental impact isn't the only cost of this.

[digrieze]

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.