Thanks, That's exactly the sort of response I was looking for from day one.
But again, I'll re-iterate.. I do not think you can blame this issue on particle size. I do not really think, at this point, that particle quality is the issue.
Either, there is some weird chemical reaction going on, causing excessive corrosion(like the pit on that copper CPU), or, this is an artifact of the paste removal, acting as a polishing compound.
I can not get a chemical engineer to envision a scenario with with the materials in our compound that would do a chemical etch - if you can propose one fine but on a consult I even asked to speculate on the off beat chance it was something in the oil as everything else is inert diamond, carbon black, Polymeric binders oil is pretty inert stuff if you have a reasonable explanation of the chemical reaction required propose it but as it stands I am told it is impossible
I appreciate you not wanting amateur investigations, however, when I posed these same issues to you 5 years ago when you made your first public sampling on HWC, you ignored my problem(and my $950 of dead hardware), and here I sit, trying to make sure to solve the problem for others. I feel that I can safely say that had myself and others not raised any concern, you may have even gone this far.
Other than being conductive how would a paste kill a chip? Now it may have happened as you say iI do not know, but I have had no reports of dead systems prior to HWC or any afterwards it has been used for years on bare die in notebooks either from users or system builders like sager with no problem. If you can point me to your post on the problem I will take a look.
Do not take this the wrong way but unless I have a pattern that develops like 5 or 6 systems in week or a month or 6 months there is nothing to investigate and unless a user can point to something specific as to cause it's as likely to be anything, a bad component or solder joint that was on the edge that did not make it through the physicall uninstall, install process. How many times do you read on the forums when somebody does an upgrade there system will not boot and some component was dead?
We have a history of responding to identified problems, when our compound was first released it had an acetate mix and knowing this we spec'd to our packager what materials could be used and not used. Being Chinese something was lost in translation and after a couple of months I got a report that our paste was drying out. I did not pay any attention as we trying to educate people about the high viscosity of the compound and figured that they were just used to the more liquid retail compounds.
Next day I got three more so I pulled some from stock just to check and it came out of the tube OK but it was a little thick. I then took a pre production sample that had been around for a year and it was considerably less so. So I band sawed 10 more samples down the middle to see what was happening in the syringe. The packager had used a conflicting material in the rubber plunger (you will note our syringes have a solid plunger now) and the neoprene was absorbing the liquid.
I called my business partner and after a 5 min conversation we decided to recall all of our entire shipments that we had shipped to date and to compensate our resellers 2X as a gesture of goodwill for the problems incurred on their end. By 5 0'clock I had contacted all resellers told them what the situation was and instructed them to dump any remaining stock.
It was a very costly mistake on our part but we moved fast and we took the hit. So we do have a history of dealing with problems.
So, to sum up, again, I think you are ignoring many possible factors here by simply assuming the problem is due to particle size, and secondly, thanks for sticking with this discussion, as unpleasant/unprofessional as it might be.
Early in my career back in the '70's I worked in a research lab at a photovoltaic company and all processes were in the micron sub micron range form sorting silicon by crystal orientation, thickness of doped oxides, Vacuum thin metal film depositions with just a couple hundred angstroms, photolithograpy, anti reflective coatings, silver plating fine line etc. We made cells for satellites for JPL as one part of my job, in any event every process involved microscope work to measure results, trouble shoot problems for contamination, damage to surface texture in other words I do have some experience with stuff in the micro range. ( I also spent 3 years as a quality control manger for an avionics control systems company so I know some about QC)
So after consulting on the chemical issue and not finding an obvious cause I am looking at the mechanical side of the equation as there are no other obvious choices. If I see a pit or a scratch I can measure it and tell you what size particle made it and even the shape will sometimes indicate what types of particles could be involved and if somebody posts a picture of a unidirectional belt sanded looking IHS and claims it was IC Diamond that did it from just the vibration of the fan I think the author should publish a paper on the new previously undiscovered effect he has encountered.
Pits are new and the first I have seen so lets take a closer look - from my end if it works out in my favour I will add it our library of things that IC Diamond does not do and if it's otherwise we will deal with it.
I am very intimate with this compound as I probably wash a tube of 24 carat off my hand every day. I have hands so smooth and soft there is many a woman or safe cracker who would be jealous, in fact they are so smooth I sometimes have a problem turning a knob on a door. Point being here anything larger than a flour would be noticed by me as a piece of diamond or grit or anything larger I would notice immediately.
Now Just because I do not agree on the source of these reports does not mean I will not investigate them if for nothing else than to put the issue to bed. The only way to do that is to measure the problem, make rational observations and then formulate a reasonable argument as to cause considering the data and information at hand and put it out for everybody to view.
FYI, my posts here in this thread are my own, and have nothing to do with my position here @ TPU. I would have posed similar questions/etc no matter the forum. I hsven't spoken to W1zzard or any other staff here about this issue, and have taken my own initiative here.
