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:The hilarious irony

[Aardpig]

The Politically correct change in chemistry results in more equipment in landfills not less!

This is almost as funny as all those dimbulbs who choose paper over plastic "to protect the enviroment" even though their paper probably used chemicals that polluted water, and the paper probably came from some asian rainforest.

Your confusing the envirnomental movement with the 'politically correct' movement demonstrates your shallow grasp of both. Your repeated use of the word 'probably' then indicates that you don't actually have any idea what you are talking about. Finally, your suggestion that paper comes from Asian rainforests demonstrates that you don't know the difference between hardwood and softwood. All in all, your stock is falling.

At a more general level, your post argues that we shouldn't try to be environmentally-conscious, lest we screw up

Re:Intentional or Accidental?

[iminplaya]

They must have known the devices would fail prematurely,

Waddya mean "prematurely"? These devices are failing right on schedule. The new parts that you will have to buy will contain all that nice DRM and "trusted computing" stuff that the copyrights holders want us to have.