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

red phoshorous???

[MoP030]

red phoshorous as a flame retardend??? it always burned quite nicely when I used to play with it...

Re:red phoshorous???

[ktanmay]

Yes, initially I was thinking about yellow phosphorus, but its just white phosphorus with small amounts of red phosphorus in it.

Intentional or Accidental?

[nurb432]

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.

Warranties?

[glpierce]

If the fault is theirs, wouldn't anyone with a warranty be able to demand a replacement?

Re:Warranties?

[glpierce]

Perhaps a Class Action suit, then?

Red Phosphorus in action

[manganese4]

Click here to see what happen when you hit Red Phosphorus

"sudden or premature end of life"

[JUSTONEMORELATTE]

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."

Is that for the warranty issue?

[oujirou]

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.

Re:Damn the irony!

[Angstroem]

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.

And more of this will come. Whether environmentalists like it or not, there are some matierials which are better suited than others for certain tasks. They might be poisonous, hard to recycle, but the stuff works without shortening the product's lifetime. What good is it, replacing those materials with lesser poisonous ones, which in term might be not so easy to recycle, cost more money to fabricate, and turn the product into a piece of dump within noticeable time.

I'm just waiting for the new lead-free solder which will be mandatory in the EU from 2005 on... It's already known to cause cold solder spots more likely to happen.

Hold on there, cowboy...

[LarsWestergren]

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".

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/1999 /107p643- 648sjodin/sjodin-full.html
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?

hold on a second

[SubtleNuance]

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.

Re:Premature component failure in healthcare...

[Red Rocket]

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?

Then think about the people who lived in the areas where those manufacturing plants dump their wastes who contracted hideous diseases from them and needed these kinds of devices but had no access to them because they're typically in poor countries without advanced health care or environmental regulations. The argument gets a little more complicated when you think about the unseen and unheard people of the world. It's immoral to just dismiss them.

Re:Horrible Industry Practices

[Gr8Apes]

umm, the leaking capacitors were made by a Taiwanese company that stole the wrong formula from their Japanese competitors. It was a classic case of let someone else do you work for you, then steal it and profit. Whoops!.

Re:Damn the irony!

[ncc74656]

Well, the same thing was said about chlorofluorocarbons. And now all new fridges etc. are CFC free, and work well (or even better than before).

Because R-134a isn't as efficient as R-12, devices that use it use more power to achieve the same effect. Your car gets its mileage and performance reduced further when you switch on the A/C and your fridge uses more electricity. Between this and the questionable "science" surrounding CFCs and ozone, I'm not convinced that the switch to R-134a was a Good Thing.