Re ESD
2011-12-26 by Stephen Farthing
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 [Non-text portions of this message have been removed]