HP Labs: the Science of Technology

HP Materials Lab

The Materials Lab was more of a forensics sort of lab, where they can look at products using microscopes ranging in power from 10-20X up to 1000X for optical, and they also had a Scanning Electron Microscope for analysis of molecular structures. Other devices included an FTIR (Fourier Transform Infrared Spectrometer) that can be used to identify various organic substances – did your laptop battery really leak on your nightstand, or is that actually cat urine? (Yes, they had someone who thought their – now non-functional – laptop was leaking where the cat turned out to be the culprit.) XRF (X-Ray Fluorescence) meanwhile can be used to determine exactly how much of various metals is present, and whether or not they're the appropriate thickness.

When deeper analysis is required – and when you don't mind destroying the product – the labs can also cut devices and components in half (or pieces) and create polished blocks showing a cross-section of the hardware. These blocks can then be analyzed under a microscope, and again the thickness of various materials is studies. So for example if the solder balls where a chip is mounted onto a PCB are too small, or have too much voiding, they can see this under a microscope.

There was a real-time X-Ray device as well, which allowed them to look at an X-Ray image of an object and move it around, zoom in on areas, etc. Another piece of equipment measured the amount of force required to push/pull on an object, so they could see how much effort is required to remove a PSU from a server, or a card from a PCIe slot, or even a USB device from a USB socket.

At this point we also started to run into areas where the testing overlapped other labs a bit, but each lab focuses on different types of testing. The Materials Lab for instance also had a bunch of thermal cycling chambers, but they were larger than those in the Environmental Lab and could be used for extended testing. One example was a sort of server motherboard mockup that had 48 DIMM slots, and they would place several of these in temperature cycling chambers where they would be subjected to cycles from 0C to 100C and back repeatedly…for around four months! When/if there were failures, they could see these from the measurements and then investigate what happened.

Wrapping up the Materials Lab, we have two final items. First was an area focused on the use of strain gauges. This wasn't something I had encountered before, but in essence strain gauges use a small sensing surface with wires coming from it that can measure the amount of flex/strain placed on a specific part of a product. There was a laptop motherboard where HP was able to determine that one part of the board was flexing too much during installation into the chassis, resulting in failures during the assembly process. Also shown was a laptop where the display was wired up with six points of strain gauges, and they could then measure how much flex in the display and cover occurred when the product was opened/closed, moved around, etc. All of these could be monitored in real-time from a system connected to the other end of the strain gauges.

The final area of the Materials Lab was for HALT (Highly Accelerated Life Test), but we were running short on time so we didn't spend too much time there. In short, HALT uses temperature, vibration, and other stresses to find weaknesses in a product. The testing typically goes beyond specifications to really exercise a product and find out where potential issues may lie rather than simply testing within limits. Again, this is a destructive test so it's not so much "pass/fail" as it is "find out why it failed". HALT is frequently done earlier in the design process to find and correct problems when it's relatively easy to do so.