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

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?