Archive of the former Yahoo!Groups mailing list: Homebrew PCBs

Hi Guys,

Interesting debate. I don't really pay that much attention to ESD in the
workshop but I am an amateur not a professional......I probably destroy
more parts by incompetence with a soldering iron/bad circuit design and
other malpractice rather than anything else...

Back in the day when I ran mainframe computer data centres for mission
critical applications (think military) I visited our suppliers QA lab. They
spent a lot of time and money in sampling the ICs from the production line,
slicing the tops of so that they could look at the die with an electron
microscope. They showed me perfect chips and chips with visible ESD damage,
the latter could work for a while but would eventually fail. Our mainframes
would run for years at a time without a hardware fault. (Software was
another matter). So I guess in the professional world ESD is an
issue....but I can't quote failure rates and this was back in the late
1980s.

73s Steve G0XAR

--
It is vain to do with more that which can be done with less.....William of
Occam

Wisdom demands a new orientation of science and technology towards the
organic, the gentle, the non-violent, the elegant and beautiful. E. F.
Schumacher


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