Foresite CEO Terry Munson spends much of his time educating others about the impact of electronics cleanliness issues. Many of our client failure analysis and process evaluation projects identify reliability issues stemming from contamination on the electronics, frequently from manufacturing residues. 

After being rudely awakened in the middle of the night several times by his home security system to finding nothing amiss, Terry began to suspect that the issues he sees at work had struck at home.

Action Taken

Terry, being Terry, was more interested in finding the cause of the false alarms than in getting a warranty replacement control panel. Besides, maybe the replacement unit would act the same. He disassembled the control and took the electronics assembly to work.

Rather than perform the analysis to quantify and identify any contamination present (since the goal was to make this unit reliable rather than to determine the source and correct the manufacturing process) the unit was sent directly to cleaning. 

The electronics were cleaned using steam per Foresite recommendations. Confident of the cleaning method and wanting all the insurance possible, Terry coated the electronics with a new conformal coating Foresite has been developing.

The Result

Re-assembled and re-installed, the control panel has been functioning flawlessly for over a year. The result supports the original theory that as the space where the control was mounted cooled during the early morning, moisture condensed on the electronics and in the presence of surface contamination, caused leakage current sufficient for the false alarm.

The effective cleaning would surely have corrected the problem – the coating alone might have, although if the contaminants remained, the coating would probably be a short term solution. With both corrective actions, uninterrupted sleep should be available for a long time.

The Implication

Instances such as this makes us wonder what is in store as IoT (the Internet of Things) applications rapidly expand.