Internet commentary
It gi'es us mair than either school or college[1]
Keywords: Internet, Computers, Soldering
As I write this, Microsoft is releasing the second Service Pack for Windows XP. I must admit that this is mind- boggling. There are about 200 megabytes of rehashed files and most of the modifications are because of security issues when connected to the Internet. For those of us who have to suffer from narrow band connections, it is almost impossible to download the total Service Pack –it would take over a day with a 56 kilobits per second modem, assuming there were no hitch in the connection. For this reason, Windows XP Update allows it to be done in small sections as and when you're on line. This is not entirely satisfactory, because the updating may be taking place behind the scenes while you're trying to use the Internet for other reasons that require all the performance that can be mustered.
There is another problem, which could arise while downloading a Service Pack in sections. It is possible to lose the use of back-ups. As various parts of the Service Pack are installed, the registry is updated. This means that, if a Windows failure occurs – and it can – then any back-up that you have may be useless because the registry will not correspond with the installed components, making it impossible to boot up. The result is potentially a very dangerous situation unless you make a new back-up after each part has been installed. The problem is all the more complex when you consider that there are four ways of backing up the Windows XP registry – and this does not count the automatic systems used for such features as reverting to the previous known good configuration. Of course, the latter will not work either, under these circumstances!
When the release was first announced, Microsoft offered a free CD with the Service Pack. This offer was withdrawn within about two days; I suppose the demand was too great! As Microsoft no longer permit the distribution of their service packs or other free software through magazine disks, it would seem that the user no longer has any choice.
It is early days yet to be able to evaluate SP 2, but it would seem that it is not without difficulties, if the enormous increase in forum activity is anything to go by. In particular, there appears to be a considerable amount of incompatibility with third party security systems. I have seen that several users have decided to remove it from the system and to go back to SP1. This does not bode well for Microsoft's already tarnished reputation.
I don't think it's worthwhile for me to take the risk of installing SP 2. In previous issues, I have described my security system and this appears to be quite robust. I know that crackers and hackers are perpetually trying to enter my system from the logs of the different security devices that I use. As far as I am aware, none have succeeded so I question whether it is worth the hassle that could possibly result from installing this Pack. This is probably another case of “if it ain't broke, don't fix it!”.
On a different tack, Microsoft and other software companies are justifiably concerned about pirated copies of their products. In the case of Windows XP,Microsoft probably thought that they had the problem solved with their ill-reputed activation system. Unfortunately, this fell down because the pirates got hold of corporate editions, which did not require activation. I receive possibly five or six invitations per day, by e-mail, to purchase these at a ridiculously low price, compared with the ridiculously high price of buying the genuine paper. Some unscrupulous computer vendors supply these pirated copies with their hardware. It has recently come to my notice that Microsoft have made it very difficult for customers who have unwittingly purchased computers to subsequently install the genuine software. It is not possible to simply install it over the existing operating system or to change the product key. This must discourage users from changing from the pirated software, because there is no improvement in functionality in doing so.
I had a really horrible day recently. I normally had three desktop computers and a laptop networked together. On this day, the first thing that happened was that my laptop stopped operating. Do what I could, nothing would get it working reliably. After extensive diagnosis, it was found that the cache memory in the CPU had failed, probably as a result of a fault elsewhere. This machine was about five years old and the manufacturers had stopped supporting it. Because I have practically stopped travelling, I decided not to waste any time or money by replacing it. I was therefore reduced to three computers. Later the same day, I switched on a computer that was used for archiving files that I did not wish to totally delete and for various experimental work. Amongst the latter, I did a considerable number of experiments using Linux. Anyway, after switching it on and before I was able to see it booted up, I smelt the unmistakable odour of burning electronics. Switching it off and back to diagnostics, I found that a short circuit on the motherboard had caused the power supply unit to render its soul. As a general rule, under such circumstances I would merely change the faulty components but this unit was six years old and would therefore need a change of CPU and the memory. I costed this with my supplier and discovered that a cheap stock computer would cost less than replacing the components. Because I was not interested in high performance, I opted for this solution. Now, one of the important tasks that I did with the old computer was to compare the security of Internet working between Windows XP and Linux (not that there is much comparison!). I installed Windows XP on this and a number of applications without difficulty. I then started to install Linux, using the Fedora (Red Hat)distribution. This seemed to start off very well, until it got to detecting the graphics. After many tries and consulting various forums on the Internet, I had to give up simply because the Northbridge chipset on the motherboard was incompatible with Linux. I mention this to illustrate that many problems can be resolved by using the Internet. My usual procedure under such circumstances is to consult the FAQs on appropriate sites and then the knowledge bases that some manufacturers offer. If this fails, I then proceed to read existing posts on the forums and, finally, as a last measure, I post a “help” message on the best forum. It is very rare that I cannot find some kind of answer to a difficulty.
As a result of these problems, I decided to change computers around and use the new one just for Windows applications. In fact, I am dictating this Internet Commentary on it, using IBM ViaVoice 10 and I have nothing to complain about. I have not yet fully installed what needs to be done on my old office computer,including Linux, because I want to make sure that I do not lose anything that may be useful from its 60 gigabytes of hard disk.
In case you're wondering, I reserve the third computer uniquely for video work. I am very heavily into this and do a lot of software beta testing for one of the biggest manufacturers in the field. This requires a very high performance computer. One job that I did recently was to translate Charles Jennings' (of Sandia National Laboratories, Albuquerque, New Mexico) famous 1976 16mm film of dendrite growth on printed circuits to an electronic format. For those interested, I have put it on the Internet for downloading at the web site: http://www.bnellis.com/dendrites.
I recently wrote an Internet Commentary, similar to this one, for our sister journal, Microelectronics International, in which I took, as the theme of my review section, undergraduate training in Microelectronics. Not surprisingly,I found a number of universities offering both undergraduate and graduate courses in the subject. This has inspired me to search in a similar vein for courses in solder or soldering. I must admit that I did not expect to find very much and was rather surprised when Google came up with 44,000 responses!However, very few have anything to do with education, as Robert Burns said in my sub-title at the start of this paper, albeit in a different context!Notwithstanding, some of the responses are interesting – many less so. Here is a selection of a few of them.
Certainly, the top link in Google has a little to do with education but is more a kind of portal to what is going on in this field. However, it does have a by-line of “Delivering e-Learning Solutions and Resources to the Electronics Community”, so I suppose it does qualify. I don't believe that I can give it high marks for credibility, though, because I read as the first sentence in the Spotlight at the head of the page, “By the end of this year, chip packaging, solder, solder paste, and other aspects of the electronics industry will start getting more environmentally friendly”. This refers,of course, to lead-free soldering but everyone knows that, viewed holistically,the introduction of lead-free solder is anything but environmentally friendly. Nor is it economically friendly. For that matter, it is not even health-and-safety-friendly. Just to briefly bolster my first contention, think of:
the increased area of tropical rain forests that must be destroyed for alluvial tin mining;
the increased soldering temperature, requiring more energy, hence carbon dioxide emissions if the local power stations are gas, oil or coal fired;
the increased VOC emissions of solvent and flux vapours at higher temperatures;
the increased difficulty of cleaning, requiring longer and more energetic cleaning cycles;
as tin is a much more reactive metal than lead, the leachability of solder joints in landfills will increase, taking with it more dangerous metals, such as silver: and this list is not even exhaustive.
This site is a store of articles in many subjects. The particular page describes a news article of a collaborative effort between some students of Northwestern University and Sorensen to develop a solar car; two announcements that SynQor and Tyco plan to eliminate lead from its products and some other irrelevant words. Obviously, this was incorporated in my search because there were a plurality of news items in the one page, not because a college was offering courses in soldering!
This is the publicity page for R.J. Klein Wassink's “bible”, Soldering in Electronics. It crept in because of the author's having studied in the Department of Metallurgy at the Technical University of Delft. However, as the best overall work available in the subject, I see no reason why it should not be mentioned here. Its value is summed up in just two sentences in a review,“There was virtually no topic that I could think of which was not addressed somewhere. I must recommend it strongly to anyone wishing to have a reference work relating to soldering, surface mount technology and electronics manufacturing generally”.
Oregon State University runs Bachelor of Science and Master of Science courses in various Engineering Technologies. One branch is in industrial and manufacturing engineering and this page shows the work covered in electronics manufacturing and assembly. This includes, amongst other subjects, printed circuit board assembly. The university claims that their graduates can start work in industry with salaries in the top 10 percentile for industrial and manufacturing engineers. Obviously, the undergraduates learn about many things other than soldering, but this is probably the nearest one can get to a valid undergraduate training in the subject. One wonders how polyvalent the graduates become, as this is so essential in our industry.
This is a 16 page presentation entitled “Achievements and activities at Division of Electronics Production, Chalmers University of Technology –Annual summary for 2002”. I think the title just about says it all, except for the important fact that this university runs both undergraduate and graduate courses in the subject. Professor Johan Liu is, of course (no pun intended!),well known in our industry, and heads an impressive faculty.
This is an interesting news article about a $360,000 award offered to Binghamton University's materials science programme for research into lead-free soldering. However, I take great exception to one sentence, which is true as a generality but is not proven to be the case within the context of the electronics industry. It states, “The Environmental Protection Agency calls lead a highly toxic metal that has been linked to a range of health effects, from behavioral problems and learning disabilities, to seizures and death”. This is a scare tactic, when within this context of lead in solder, and is therefore totally out-of- place. I would have thought a respected university would have been more careful about what it publishes on its web site. On the other hand, most of the rest of the article is more accurate and interesting.
This page gives an abstract of an IEEE paper entitled “Lead-Free Soldering in the Japanese Electronics Industry”. The full paper would be interesting, but access is restricted. It is written by four authors from the University of Maryland, the Yokohama National University and the Tokyo Metropolitan Institute of Technology. It makes it clear that Japanese industry has pre-empted legislation in the matter. The study involves corporate strategy as much as the technical issues.
This is a slide presentation, published by Montana State University. As a guess, I would say it was compiled to help students who have never soldered anything in their lives. The mention of “Burn Cream” suggests that the joke about university students not knowing which end of a soldering iron to hold may have a basis of fact! At least, they grab the wrong end only once– I assume students have sufficient intelligence not to repeat the experiment!
This is another co-operative project on assessing the implications of lead-free soldering, including the University of Tennessee. I fear it has been instigated by similar false premisses as I've outlined for the Techonline review, earlier in this article. Notwithstanding, lead-free soldering is here to stay and anything that helps assemblers to implement it must be welcome; who knows what help they will need if they seek reliability!
This is quite an interesting short magazine article written by the director of the University at Buffalo's Electronic Packaging Laboratory and an associate professor of engineering in the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences. Its primary object is to discuss the behaviour of solder joints when stressed under a high current density. The laboratory has developed a means of measuring the strain down to 27.5nm. Interesting!
Remember my review of the Montana State University's instructions on how to solder, a few paragraphs previously? Well Kansas University has done something similar, but less graphically. I approve of the fact that they have included some H&S warnings: “Note: Remember that when soldering, the rosin in the solder releases fumes. These fumes are harmful to your eyes and lungs. Therefore, always work in a well ventilated area. Solder contains lead, which is toxic if ingested. Hot solder splashes present a danger to the naked eye. Eye protection is required and mandatory!” (even if I believe that when something is mandatory, it is also required!).
This is the Home Page of the Electronics Manufacturing Engineering Research Group at the University of Greenwich (previously, Salford University). It is a very badly designed page, not only because it has some ridiculously large graphics, but because it uses a JavaScript applet that does not conform to good code, causing overlapping of various text items beyond the graphics where they are supposed to be sited. In fact, some of it is illegible in browsers that conform to strict interpretation of the HTML standards. Another weakness is that the site does not appear to have been updated for the last two years, which is a pity because its positive side is the listing of projects and many publications.
Here's a funny one to finish with – well, funny-peculiar, not funny-ha-ha. This is what is called a sixth-form college in the UK, taking kids of about 16 to 18 years of age and preparing them for A-levels, which are necessary for university entrance. Normally, sixth form work is done at ordinary secondary or grammar schools, rather than special ones – or, at least,this is how it used to work. This school has an enormously wide range of courses in the arts and sciences. I was rather surprised to find this two-year preparatory course in electronics, not being aware that electronics was even taught at high school level. Nevertheless, I was disappointed in “We devote little or no time to soldering the circuits. We are far more interested in the underlying ideas and the design process than in hard wiring the final product. ...This is not a soldering course but a very good introduction to the theory and practice of electronics. You will need good practical skills and a genuine interest in Electronics”. Surely the practice of electronics and the development of practical skills must include hard wiring and, therefore,soldering? Is this a paradox or am I being obtuse?
From these reviews, it appears that those educational establishments with research departments in this field are concentrating on lead-free technology,which does not come as a big surprise. Nor am I astonished at how few universities conduct undergraduate or postgraduate courses including assembly techniques and soldering, although a handful obviously do. What does surprise me, then? I think I must say that the metallurgy and chemistry of soldering does not seem to have a high priority, compared with the physical and mechanical characteristics of the actual solder joint. In other words, little fundamental scientific research seems to be undertaken, even if there is much applied science. Surely, I would have thought that the universities and institutes of technology would be the place to conduct research, but I'm afraid that applied science pays better because of external funding from industry and governmental departments.
Brian EllisCyprusb_ellis@protonique.com
Note1. Leeze me on drink! it gi'es us mair than either school or college, Robert Burns, “The Holy Fair” (1786), st. 1
