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

I can see the results here, oddly enough.

[Puggles]

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... :(

Re:I can see the results here, oddly enough.

[Threni]

That's not resin...sounds like something stronger, such as a Skunk v - Northern Lights I hybrid.

Is it going my way?

Is this why...

[AccUser]

...most hard disk manufacturers have reduced their warrenties from 3-years to 1-year in the not so distant past?

Re:Is this why...

[EvilTwinSkippy]

It all comes back to the wal-mart conundrum. At some point the price reductions we demand from manufacturers starts to cost indirectly more that we are saving on the sticker price.

With Wal-Mart they tend to employ a fraction of the people that a similarly sized retailer would, at a much lower wage. They also tend to drive other local retailers out of business, thus fewer people are employed for less money, lowering the Domestic Product for that community. In the case of a SuperWalmart, they also tend to depress the spending power of SEVERAL communities.

In this case hard drives have become so "cheap" that we end up buying them at twice or 3 times the rate. Add it up, are we saving that much money?

Re:Is this why...

[Jahf]

Actually, while you're right about Wal-Mart being worse than Target, K-Mart, etc, the points you raise are effects of their policy to keep prices low, not the -cause- of why they have low prices.

Wal-Mart's practices are there because they need them to retain their low price leadership in an economy that has adapted to WM's first round of low price wars.

You also don't mention the biggest key to WM's forced price lowering ... they are such a larger part of the economy that they are able to -force- manufacturers to sell at lower prices to WM that to other retailers. They have literally caused companies to move offices from across the country to Arkansas so that the companies can more efficiently "negotiate with" (read: cower in front of) WM. WM sets the hours and often has unofficial hiring authority over these Arkansan satellite offices. NO other retailer has ever had that kind of power.

However, even that is not the -cause-. The cause is the willingness of most Americans to sacrifice their community retailers and specialty chains for lower prices and "all under one roof" shopping, even if as a whole the selection of products is lower. That short sighted view in the end causes the community as a whole to lose value (monetarily as well as socially), making Wal-Mart the ONLY long-term winner in that situation.

The answer is as simple as telling an overweight person to diet and exercise ... people have to stop low-price gouging and shopping at the cheapest possible place. And it is just as hard to -convince- a person of that as it is to convince them to stick to a diet.

BTW, yes it is true that K-Mart and Target -started- the concepts on a nationwide scale. However they never abuse their position (possibly because they never attained a position as strong as WM) like WM has.

Economics will eventually right the situation, but the damage that will have been done by that point (which won't occur until WM has completely exhausted it's growth capacity AND product development has stagnated due to lack of competition) will be horrendous to everyone's standard of living.

BTW, if you shop at "Sam's", you shop at Wal-Mart. Got a Costco or similar non-Sam's wholesaler? Go there.

Red Phosphorous...

[Bigman]

...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.

sh*t

[real_smiff]

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.

Re:red phoshorous???

[Absurd Being]

I really want to mod you as +1, Flamebait, but there's no option.

Just remember that everything carries a cost

[squarooticus]

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.

Re:Just remember that everything carries a cost

[Red Rocket]

...everything carries a cost, including radical environmentalism.

As does radical industrialism. Polluting the planet willy-nilly just so someone can make a buck has a huge cost but, unfortunately, that cost is not included in the price of the manufactured goods. The manufacturer has thus found a way to privatize the profits while he socializes the cost. It's one of the ways that our form of capitalism has become distorted from a sustainable form of capitalism. All costs should be included in the price of the product or it's not really capitalism.

Re:Just remember that everything carries a cost

[Skjellifetti]

You are right, but measuring the economic cost of environmental degradation is a real difficult problem for two reasons. First, since few environmental goods are traded in marketplaces, it is hard to get the required price/quantity data that would enable us to measure the demand curves for environmental goods(*) and, thus, the cost or amount of compensation individuals would require in order to tolerate a given quantity of environmental degradation. This is based on the idea that if a tree falls in a forest and nobody gives a damn, is its loss really a cost? The second problem is defining how we should aggregate these individual costs. One rich enviromentalist (with a high demand for environmental goods) could swamp the (perhaps negative) demand by many poor people without jobs. Should many poor folks go without jobs in order to satisfy the desires of a few rich folks for a high quality environment? If I read the anti-globalization types correctly, they essentially say yes, while the pro globalization folks seem willing to ignore the environmental problems completely. There is a "correct" balance in there somewhere, but calculating precisely where is hardly an exact science.

* Disclaimer: I used to do this for a living.

Premature component failure in healthcare...

[emtboy9]

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.

Re:heh - this will be new copout...

[Anonymous Coward]

>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.

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.

Great...

[EvilTwinSkippy]

No better way to jumpstart the economy than to make people go out and re-buy all the expensive high-end components they...

Oh wait, we don't manufacture anything in the US anymore. Well, bully for everyone else.

Re:Great...

[danheskett]

Broken Window Fallacy

Read it, learn it, love it, spread it.

Re:Intentional or Accidental?

[fish waffle]

You cant believe that this wasn't tested before it was decided upon.

Conspiracy theories are by nature unassailable. However, according to the article there is a simple reason why it wasn't tested, and that is that it was an unexpected effect, for which there was no test:

Most equipment and IC manufacturers perform reliability tests when adopting new encapsulation materials, and when shipping or receiving components. Even so, almost no problems were found at all this time, because this type of problem has never been experienced before. As one manufacturer commented, "This is the first example of this failure mode in the world. It's something that cannot be detected by existing reliability tests."

Re:Space Shuttle Blew up due to Environmental Conc

[Aardpig]

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.

Motivations

[HeghmoH]

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.

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:red phoshorous???

[MoP030]

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

What this is

[Quantum-Sci]

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.