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

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.

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."

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: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.