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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.'"
... 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 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!
I'm sure that you've noticed, for hard drives at least, that many manufacturers have scaled back warranty support from 3 years to 1 year.
And the muscular cyborg German dudes dance with sexy French Canadians