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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.'"
It's strange to read that, since the Digital-Analog converter on my video card apparently has died this morning when my computer turned on.
:(
On the plus side to this premature failure, Slashdot now looks extremely trippy... Those green bars keep blinking magenta!
The down side is the contrast for text is really bad...
Pereant, inquit, qui ante nos nostra dixerunt.
"Confound those who have said our remarks before us."
Nah, thats white phosphorous your thinking about.
I could be wrong. I'm always wrong...
...most hard disk manufacturers have reduced their warrenties from 3-years to 1-year in the not so distant past?
Any fool can talk, but it takes a wise man to listen.
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.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
...Does that mean if my chips glow red in the dark then its a bad thing?
Perhaps I need one of those heat-sink thingies.
*--BigMan--- Time flies like an arrow.. but personally I prefer a nice glass of wine!
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.
-- Power corrupts, but PowerPoint corrupts absolutely.
first the leaky capacitors, now this. any way to find out exactly what this material went into? like a list of manufacturers using it? i bet not right! btw this was published in December 2002.
This is my Sig, this is my Gun. One is for Slashdot and one is for Fun.
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!
If the fault is theirs, wouldn't anyone with a warranty be able to demand a replacement?
G
I really want to mod you as +1, Flamebait, but there's no option.
Karma: Excellent^(-t/Tau), Tau=Wittiness/Trollishness
Click here to see what happen when you hit Red Phosphorus
I make my face look like this and concerned words come out.
Just remember that everything carries a cost, including radical environmentalism. If you support making policy solely on the basis of someone's fears, then you'd better not whine when those policies cost you money, as they did in this case. Remember that saving the earth doesn't happen for free, and when you raise costs for those "greedy corporations," they just pass their cost right onto you, the consumer.
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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.
"Our funds have never taken part in toxic or death spiral convertible financings of any sort" -BayStar's managing partne
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."
Yes, initially I was thinking about yellow phosphorus, but its just white phosphorus with small amounts of red phosphorus in it.
>And if the environmentalists keep getting their way
Yeah those damn peacenik hippi socialists that control the house, senate, supreme court, white house, wto, and all of those multi-national companies that are ruining this world or ours.
Oh wait, we don't manufacture anything in the US anymore. Well, bully for everyone else.
"Learning is not compulsory... neither is survival."
--Dr.W.Edwards Deming
The foam on the last space shuttle was used because it was more environmentally friendly, even though it was inferior. At least that's what I read (just put 'space shuttle foam environment' into google).
I expect you read this article in Capitalist Magazine. The title of the article, "Earth Worshippers Cause Death in Space", really brings home the high levels of dispassionate reporting and journalistic integrity enjoyed by the magazine. Truly, everything they say must be true.
Tubal-Cain smokes the white owl.
The world according to slashdot:
If I break it, it's an accident.
If you break it, you're a moron.
If a corporation breaks it, it's a conspiracy.
Mod down posts with a "Free Mac Mini/iPod" sig, they're spam!
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".
9 /107p643- 648sjodin/sjodin-full.html
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/199
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?
Being bitter is drinking poison and hoping someone else will die
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.
the 'politically correct' movement
Has there ever been a 'politically correct' movement of substantial size? Unlikely.
The expression was appopriated as a lazy and hollow (but effective) smear against anything the right wing don't like.
Want to gain easy points? Accuse your opponent/the thing you dislike of being 'politically incorrect' and for *absolutely no cost* you get to become the heroic figure making a lone stand against the forces of communism, or whatever.
It's clever, because you don't have to debate the specifics of your argument. There's a good bit about this technique here (see 'Viso Sciolto').
However, since it permeated the mainstream so extensively, 'Politically Correct' has tended to be used by people who are lazy and/or stupid, like the celebrity chef who was cooking something with cream, and pointed out that "I know it's politically incorrect, but.. yadda yadda".
No, it's your choice. If you want to guzzle 5 pints of cream a day, and die of obesity or whatever, that's your problem.
Of course, then you can sue the cream makers. Genius! You get to play the "don't tell me what I can and can't do" card for years, and when the consequences of your actions hit, you can whine and blame the food-makers for not protecting you.
Personally, I'd rather see junk-food manufacturers sued for advertising shitty food to kids or making misleading claims.
"Slashdot - News and Chat Sites Deviant". (Click "homepage" link above for details).
no, no. Of course white phosphorous is even more reactive and may even ignite itself when in contact with oxygen. But red phsphorous burns pretty good, too. makes a lot of smoke as well (good for smoke bombs, the smoke forms phosphoric acid thogether with the air humidity though) and together with potassium chlorate (KCl03) it makes nice explosions.
here is a link to a chemicals supplier. notice the risk statements: R11 = Highly flammable, R16 = Explosive when mixed with oxidizing substances
the most sexp i get is my paren-mode.
Red phosphorus is mixed with the packaging resin, which encases chip die and lead frame. It's about 2-3% of that black plastic.
Apparently red phospherus enables an internal short, probably by reacting with the resin to make a carbon channel. This is my best guess, given the info we have.
The majority of US chip companies these days are just design labs. They hire Asian chip foundries to actually render their designs to product, and it appears that they are the manufacturer. More and more the large chipmakers are doing this too -- farming out production. This new process would be used on commodity chips first, like logic and memory. Unlikely to be in high-end chips like processors, A/D, etc.
Some here deride the environmental reasoning for the change. It's pretty stupid to not care about dioxin, no matter where it is. These Exxon fascists would also say that global warming is a myth, because it's cold today... well it's warmer than it was 20 years ago. In about 30 years, you'll be paying for dikes to protect New York and Los Angeles from being flooded, ignorant bastard. Weather will be erratic and catastrophic. But that's not your problem today, now is it? Anti-environmental/anti-intellectual clods should be the ones who suffer for their short-sighted ignorant views, not the world as a whole. But unfortunately that's not how things work.
Campaign finance reform is national security.
For what it's worth, the folks arguing about environmental impact of the new vs. the old resin are missing a big part of the picture. The costs in time and replacement to organizations is a lot more than just buying a part.
To use the Fujitsu drives for example. Data lost on a failed drive has a value and may be non recoverable. Most places don't do daily backups, but even the changes in data over 24 hours can be significant and add the cost of the employee's salary in time in recreating the data. Replacement of drives known defective and not failed costs in time for data transfer and drive replacement in addition to purchase and validation of new drives. After the drive is replaced if it contains sensitive data it has to be disassembled and destroyed properly. After all that it makes it to the landfill.
Figure it this way:
$30 - 1 hour (failed) attempted data recovery
$60 - cost of replacement drive
$30 - 1 hour installation and reghosting of new drive
$100 - 4 hours recreating lost data
$15 - 30 min manual destruction of old drive
=$235
-$60 assume reimbursement for drive (not guaranteed)
=$175 because it was defective material!
Multiply that by the Fujitsu disaster (one and a half dumpster loads of drives after destruction, as I remember) and the cost gets up there. Remember, you may get the cost of the drive back, eventually, but never the cost of your labor.
Oh yeah, and you're still filling up the landfill.
It doesn't matter what you wrap your emotions around, Reality is a brick wall specifically designed to scramble eggs
The classic example of this was the conversion of the basic "hamburger box" by McDonalds....
... "The manufacturing process uses other resources, too--one study estimates that manufacturing a Styrofoam clamshell uses 30 percent less energy, and generates 46 percent less air pollution and 42 percent less water pollution, than does manufacturing a paperboard box."
"In November 1990 the McDonald's Corporation, largely in response to pressure from the public and from environmental groups, made the decision to replace Styrofoam "clamshell" hamburger containers with paperboard boxes."
Not to mention the paper box insulates poorly, requiring more heat-lamp energy; and because paper has to be treated to repel grease, it decomposes slower than normal paper, and could not be recycled like the plastic-based styrofoam could.