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Chip Aging Accelerates
- IshKebab 9y ago> Chips developed for computers and phones lasted an average of two to four years of normal use. Err what?
- dyeje 9y agoI wonder if the average is skewed because so many people buy new phones every year / every other year.
- nordsieck 9y agoStill, it's not like the chips are failing. People typically get a new phone because: * Battery is too degraded * Hardware is unsupported by the current OS version * Screen failure * Water damage (not as much with newer water resistant phones) * Want to be able to run apps faster * OS/Firmware failure (e.g. bootloop) * Want to own the latest phone (non-performance reasons) * Want a phone with a new hardware feature (e.g. wireless charging) I don't think I've ever heard of someone's phone just not working mysteriously.
- kuon 9y agoIt is not a phone, but my coffee machine electronic just died (but after 7 years). It had no visible damage (water, electric shock). After changing the main PCB it was working again, like new. I regret not playing more with the old PCB though, like checking capacitors or resistors values.
- ComputerGuru 9y agoIt might have been bad solder. Some of that lead-free stuff is utter garbage and could have failed mechanically (of it hadn’t been on right) or reflowed due to the heat.
- organsnyder 9y agoI fixed our 20-year-old range by replacing capacitors. They failed exactly like the caps on early-mid-2000's motherboards.
- kuschku 9y agoYeah, I’m right now using a 14 year old monitor, and I’ve replaced two caps, but it’s still running. Next to it I have a 6 year old monitor, in which I can’t replace the caps because it’s glued together.
- marcosdumay 9y agoBesides, when something fails, it's almost always capacitors, mechanical devices or FLASH memory. Unless those "chips" the article is talking about is only FLASH, it's a very weird statement.
- pvtmert 9y agoactually i had s4 mini and it died after 3 or so years, no booting, black screen only. power button does nothing and computer doesnt see.
- HankB99 9y agoDid you diagnose the cause of the failure? My guess is it was a failed power supply and that likely resulted from failed capacitors.
- falcolas 9y agoMost chip failures do not surface as "just stop working" - they surface as the chip overheating much more often. Or the chip over-volting other components. Or failing to throttle down, resulting in excessive battery wear. Or surfacing the occasional computation error. Or some feature just no longer being available. Also remember: batteries, screen, BIOS... all are controlled by their own chips these days; chips whose failures are attributed to the component they're attached to.
- btashton 9y agoI assume by bootloop you are talking about the LG failure that impacted the Nexus 5x among others. That _was_ attributed to hardware failure. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/LG_smartphone_bootloop_issues#Cause https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/LG_smartphone_bootloop_issue...
- pps43 9y ago> I don't think I've ever heard of someone's phone just not working mysteriously. My Nokia 808 suddenly died after a couple of years. Blank screen, did not react to any button presses or reset attempts. Even after replacing the battery.
- barrkel 9y agoBootloop is down to hardware ageing, specifically solder, as I understand it. System resets etc. don't fix it. I've had two phones die from it. The cure for the brave involves reflowing the solder in an oven.
- ekianjo 9y agoThe used market for computers strongly suggests otherwise...
- venomsnake 9y agoGo to task manager. See how much of the time you are using less than 10% of the CPU
- blattimwind 9y agoSurvivorship bias. A lot of low-end gear dies in this time frame due to insufficient cooling, badly designed cases etc.
- Neil44 9y agoI agree, when I’m troubleshooting a general rule is ‘it’s never the CPU’. I think the writer has misinterpreted something to derive that statement.
- carlmr 9y agoFrom the rest of the article I would have said 2 to 4 years of use at a high utilization. In that case maybe. It's never the CPU has been my rule as well, except for a new build. Then it might be the CPU.
- toast0 9y agoThe Nexus 5x CPU solder failed pretty regularly at 1 year. I'm not sure if that counts as the chip lasting that long, because the CPU was technically fine, just poorly soldered, but the product wasn't working.
- thinkythought 9y agoSee also: The xbox 360 fiasco
- kabdib 9y agoThis is a real thing. For game consoles, which run their chips pretty "hot" in order to meet the performance requirements for high-end gaming, the main SOCs have a design lifetime. There are deliberate trade-offs between performance and the expected lifetime of the part. This lifetime is difficult to estimate prior to ship. One console made a firmware update about a year after its release that increased its clocks by about ten percent. I'm guessing they did this after seeing telemetry numbers indicating that the box's cooling system was doing a better job than expected, and that there was lifetime headroom available (probably other factors were involved, too, but heat is a major one).
- ethbro 9y agoI'd be charitable and say that gaming chips run hot because cooling systems are "optimized", not for performance reasons. And by optimized, I mean shoehorning the smallest / cheapest solution in there that barely meets cooling needs.
- kabdib 9y agoConsoles are pretty serious about effective cooling. There is definitely price pressure, but that's not a one-sided thing -- you need to make sure that the unit lasts long enough, and that its cooling system doesn't generate too much noise for the environment (typically a quiet living room). And then you need headroom for envrionmentals (e.g., being stuff into the back of an entertainment unit next to other equipment). The current generation of consoles are quiet compared to the last generation, and more powerful. Cooling "needs" have to take into account the whole product and user experience, not just keeping a single chip from melting down.
- lione 9y agoI think all the console makers learned a lesson from the Red Ring Of Death. No one wants to be having a massive portion of their systems become useless hunks of scrap because of poor thermal design not dissipating enough heat and causing the solder to crack.
- jepler 9y agoWhile we tend to think of them as unchanging, perfect slabs, integrated circuits change over their lifetimes and eventually fail. Unsurprisingly, these effects are greater when feature sizes are smaller. Here are some links I dug up on the subject: https://semiengineering.com/transistor-aging-intensifies-10nm/ https://semiengineering.com/transistor-aging-intensifies-10n... http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/abstract/document/7796117/ http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/abstract/document/7796117/ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Negative-bias_temperature_instability https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Negative-bias_temperature_inst... A vivid real world example of this was the 2011 Cougar Point chipset problem which would cause the SATA ports to essentially burn out well short of the expected lifetime of the system. https://semiengineering.com/transistor-aging-intensifies-10nm/ https://semiengineering.com/transistor-aging-intensifies-10n...
- api 9y agoIn my experience there are parts that fail in the first few years, but after that you get a long tail with some lasting decades.
- opwieurposiu 9y agoThis is known as the "Bathtub Curve" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bathtub_curve https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bathtub_curve
- SemiTom 9y agoIt's not just about the CPUs or APUs, which generally have very high yield and long lifetimes. It's all the other chips. SSD begins exhibiting errors after extensive use. Other chips that are considered good enough are at the high end of their acceptable performance tolerances when they are included in devices, but the effects are additive. So the more chips running at the high or low end of what is considered acceptable, the more likely that problems will crop up over time.
- kec 9y agoSilicon chips age due to electromigration, which is exacerbated by small feature sizes. Chips made 20 year ago could take decades for enough migration to cause failure which is why you’ve never known or cared before. Today due to the much smaller processes we use it’s closer to a few years.
- kingosticks 9y agoAnd hot-carrier injection (HCI), oxide breakdown and, negative-bias temperature instability (NBTI).
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- ansible 9y agoComputing in automotive is a challenge. In the past, you might have automotive-grade microcontrollers for functions like ABS, which consume less than a Watt maximum. You paid a little attention to having enough ground vias on the PCB for thermal conductivity, and that was about it to qualify the design for the high end of the temperature range. Degraded lifetime wasn't so much of a concern. These days, you've got ARM processors with a TDP of 15W or more, and keeping the die temperatures below the maximum when the ambient temperature is 85C, well, that starts to get interesting. Especially if you don't want to use a fan, and the processor is stuck somewhere without adequate airflow. And then you've got high-end systems with a TDP in the 150W range. Then you've got to have a good cooling solution to run your application at office environment temperatures, nevermind the full automotive temperature range. And what's going to be the lifetime for these parts running at elevated temperatures, even if you are staying within the maximum temperature limits? Sigh
- carlmr 9y agoAutomotive chips under the hood have to be rated up to 125°C environmental temperature. 150°C in some locations.
- ansible 9y agoYep. The junction temperature is rated up to that. What I'm saying is that even so, thermal design is a challenge. And I have concerns about chip lifetime under those sorts of conditions.
- roymurdock 9y agoAs more critical functionality in cars comes to be controlled by MCU/CPUs and software over ECUs and mechanical components, I wonder if software obsolescence will have a larger impact than potential chip failure from increased use. It's not hard to imagine a future where Tesla stops developing and pushing updates for cars after 5-10 years, basically forcing an owner to trade up as the hardware in older models becomes incompatible with the latest self-driving algos. It's also not hard to imagine a future where Amazon/Uber/Bigco own and update large fleets of vehicles, maintaining and renting them out much like AWS does compute cycles, taking the burden off the user to maintain their own hardware.
- squarefoot 9y agoChips aging aside, tin whiskers also are one of the main reasons why manufacturers shouldn't use electronics except where it is really really really necessary, especially on things that move at high speeds with humans on board or in vicinity. NASA itself -which use electronics on stuff that gets in orbit- did some good research on the subject. https://nepp.nasa.gov/Whisker/background/index.htm https://nepp.nasa.gov/Whisker/background/index.htm Tl;dr: Tin whiskers are very thin spontaneous metallic formations which can short nearby pcb tracks or conductors and are believed to be the cause of many failures in electronic devices. There is no evidence of a single cause for their formation but it seems certain that eliminating lead (RoHS legislations etc.) from solder is one of them.
- Slansitartop 9y agoCan't they coat the PCBs to mitigate/elminiate the problem? I remember watching a teardown of a spare-no-expense embedded military computer, and the guy couldn't stop talking about how much "conformal coating" the board had. Edit: I think this is the video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=55z_0BYb5is https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=55z_0BYb5is
- squarefoot 9y agoFrom what I understand, conformal coating is intended to protect against external agents (moisture, etc), and it does the job well, but it's not equally effective when the problem is between adjacent conductors of the same pcb; for that purpose the substance should be able to penetrate the tiny space between chip pins. It would probably help to some extent though.
- blattimwind 9y agoDepends. If its dipped (or just sprayed on) it won't get inbetween fine pitches, but application in a vacuum will force it into every tiny space. It's essentially the same as vacuum-potted transformers.
- the-dude 9y ago
- Animats 9y agoTwo to four year lifespan? I happen to know that the design life for the Ford EEC IV, the ignition control system for 1980s Fords, was 30 years. That was achieved; many 30-year old Fords are still running with the original electronics.
- SemiTom 9y agoarticle says "Chips developed for computers and phones were designed to operate at peak performance for an average of two to four years of normal use. After that, functionality began to degrade"
- kingosticks 9y agoEnterprise ASICs (i.e. routers) already run at these very hot (and cold) temperatures on the very latest nodes. They also demand reliability over long periods - although the consequences of failing to meet that are obviously not as severe. Ageing is much worse at 7nm but it's already accounted for during STA. Like everything else, you just assume the worst and it's another chunk of your clock period you never see. But expecting to run above 125C... not sure about that.