Citation
Ellis, B. (2007), "Internet commentary", Circuit World, Vol. 33 No. 1. https://doi.org/10.1108/cw.2007.21733aag.001
Publisher
:Emerald Group Publishing Limited
Copyright © 2007, Emerald Group Publishing Limited
Internet commentary
Thou, whose eternal Word Chaos and darkness heard... (John Marriot, opening lines of a hymn written in 1813).
I am taking a bold step to write this Commentary. I am writing it in Word 2007 beta version under Windows Vista Release Candidate 1! You may wonder at my temerity, but I do like to know what the future reserves for us. You will no doubt imagine that I have not burnt my boats, because this installation is a dual-boot, thus keeping my Windows XP installation intact.
Vista is bloatware par excellence; it requires nearly 15GB to install with 10GB for the completed installation. The size of the registry alone takes on gigantic proportions, over 100,000 lines for a basic set-up. The installation itself passed without incident in a bit over 30min. Any user of Windows XP will have little difficulty navigating round Vista. Appearance-wise, it is a vast improvement, having lost a great deal of that “Fisher-Price” look. One of the first things anyone will notice is the User Account Control, which is an irritating dialogue that comes up for little or no reason, such as taking a deep breath. Happily, it can be disabled. Another semi-annoyance is Windows Defender. It appears to be a good malware shield; what annoys me is that if you have an application that you want to start at boot-up time and it has not been approved by Microsoft, the way to get it to start is far from intuitive. This is possibly even obstructive.
From the internet point of view, what is now Windows Internet Explorer is improved and has somewhat caught up with some of its rivals, such as Firefox and Opera, although it has some way to go yet. For example, it now has a feature, tabs, that has been popular with the others for years. It may appear much lighter than Firefox with only a bit over 2MB, as against about 16MB for the latter but do not be fooled, because most of WIE is embedded in the Vista OS. I suspect the change of name is to prove to the European Union that it really is part of the operating system and not an add-on. Outlook Express has been replaced by Windows Mail, with a few more bells and whistles to catch up, at least half-way, with the competition.
Happily, both Mozilla Firefox and Thunderbird install beautifully under Vista and I am delighted to be able to continue using them. I also have POPFile working well, to sort out my mail automatically into various mailboxes. What is less joyful is that the Windows Firewall is still protecting only incoming connections; there is still no protection for outgoing data. Worse still, my AVG anti-virus and ZoneAlarm firewall are prevented by Microsoft from installing. A check found that a new download from AVG resolved the situation and I do now have anti-virus protection, but there is no way I could get the two-way firewall to install.
This brings me directly to my other bone of contention regarding Vista; many softwares will either not install or they will not run: not just one or two but about half of those I tried. What is the use of an operating system that will not run an application? Worse still – wait for it – some of my hardware lacks drivers for it. For example, my 18-month-old scanner cannot be made to work nor even my programmable keyboard (it works as a non-programmable one). Furthermore, on the desktop, there is a very visible Program Compatibility Wizard icon. This is supposed to guide you to “downgrading” Vista to an earlier Windows version for a specific application. This does work with some, but not with most applications. Microsoft is going to have to do some serious work here before the definitive version is released.
Some of the software that does work on my machine includes OpenOffice, Microsoft Office 2007, Audacity (an open source audio editor), Vutrax (my favourite ECAD suite), Registrar Lite, some but not all of my Ulead video products, etc.
Vista does, of course, come with an enhanced number of accessories and gadgets, some more useful than others. An optional sidebar will display any number of them, such as your local weather, time (with a visible clock), date, CPU usage and so on. There are more games than ever, including chess, but the XP internet games have been dropped; the card games are much uglier than in XP, despite a choice of card styles. The Run feature is now well hidden under Accessories unless you select the Classic Start Menu, which I find more intuitive than the new one, but that is probably just a question of habit. (I use the Classic configuration under XP, as well!)
One of the features of Vista is that it incorporates voice recognition. Initially, I could not get my microphone to work under Vista. It seems there was some driver incompatibility with the sound card. This was cured by downloading a new driver. The application permits both navigation and dictation. I have used VR, initially with IBM and later with Dragon Naturally Speaking, for 15 years, so I consider I know a little of what it is about. Its accuracy and “speed of learning” is not as good as DNS or even IBM Simply Speaking Gold and its interface is downright poor. However, correcting an error when dictating text is counter-intuitive. In the first place, the correction dialogue box puts itself over what you are trying to correct, so you cannot see what you are doing and then it offers every single iteration of the word you are trying to correct; as short words, such as of, in or be, have the fewest phones, they are the most likely to be misinterpreted and to have to choose between 20 and 30 examples of the same word in an article is rather ridiculous. As Microsoft is a relative newcomer to VR, it will obviously take them some time before they catch up with others with 15 or more years experience in the technology.
My conclusion on Vista: it appears interesting but it is not ready for the average user to rush in and install it. If you keep your status quo for at least a year, it should have most of the bugs ironed out and drivers should be available. Many people wait for at least one service pack to be issued before they take the plunge and this might not be a bad policy.
I'll confine my remarks about the Office 2007 suite essentially to Word, although I have tried some of the other applications: Excel, PowerPoint, Publisher and Access. I have been using it for some time under XP, before migrating it to Vista, comparing it to earlier versions. You may think there would be little or no difference between the OSs. Visually, there is nothing much but I have found a few functional differences. For example, the Thesaurus works fine under XP but it is awful under Vista; it defaults from Thesaurus to Research in French, with automatic translation, at least chez moi, and I do not have anything French installed. However, do remember that this is a beta version, not even a release candidate, so there is plenty of time for it to be corrected.
Unlike Vista, the Office suite has a totally new look (Figure 1). At first, this is a shocker; you can forget where you found such-and-such an item before, because it is no longer there. As a guess, I would say the best part of 90 per cent of the old version remains almost unchanged, once you have found it. The traditional menus and toolbars have been replaced by a series of seven “Ribbons” each with a specific context. The one shown in the Figure is the “Home Ribbon” and is the easiest to understand because many of the icons are already familiar, with the possible exception of the styles box to the right of centre. Even these do not require an Einstein to understand. Note that some of the boxes have little arrows to the bottom right for expansion.
Figure
1 Microsoft Word 2007 running under Windows Vista. Note the “Ribbon”
which has replaced the menus and toolbars in Word. The right hand optional side
bar in Vista can be configured to display many kinds of information
Possibly, the “Insert Ribbon” will be the most surprising one because it replaces a whole host of purely menu items, with a simple drag and drop, with all sorts of shapes, such as flowchart symbols, arrows, balloons or customisable shapes. References and, above all, review have been much enhanced, which will be a great help to those doing committee editing of documents. Mailings are greatly simplified.
Has Word caught up with other word processing packages? I think the answer must be “partially” and it has even overtaken them in some respects. It still lacks some of the refinements that may be found in WordPerfect, such as the Reveal Codes function, although it has made a step or two in the right direction as it is currently possible to find and replace a few of the tags. It is now all bells and whistles with such items as document translation, provided the computer has internet access. The free translation is of poor quality, as is often the case when you let a computer do it. Notwithstanding, if you want better quality with human intervention, it offers the possibility – at a price. The following example will show how useful the automatic translation is not:
Now is the time to come to the aid of the party., translated into French, becomes: Est maintenant l'heure de venir à l'aide de la partie. Translated back into English, it becomes: Is now the hour to come using the part. Not exactly the same, is it?
There is one feature that I think most users will like; there is a Quick Access Toolbar above the Ribbons, by default. It contains a File button but also Save, Undo, Redo and Quick Print. It is very easily customised with any command you like. For example, I detest the Quick Print, as I use multiple printers and settings, so I replaced it with the standard Print... command, quicker clicking that than Ctrl-P! Right-clicking any Ribbon icon or command will add it to the Quick Access Toolbar, and it may be removed similarly. This makes it very easy to adjust it to any specific job in hand.
An important point to consider is compatibility. Its native file extension is no longer.doc but is now.docx; this means there is a change in formatting. It will read.doc documents and convert them into.docx, so there is no need to worry on this score. Simple.docx documents are also readable in earlier versions of Word, on condition that they contain nothing specific to the new version. There is a “translator” which will convert the new format into.doc, with dire warnings, but it is also possible to set it to work in the old format. Word 2007 users therefore can be sure that they can remain compatible with other users who are still exploiting anything between Word 97 and 2003 or even WordPerfect.
Unlike the previous versions, Word 2007 plays internet web page generation in a much lower key. This is not a bad thing because word processor-based web pages are usually horrendously clumsy in the way they generate HTML code. In contrast, a very welcome addition is that it can natively generate PDF files and XPS documents. Unfortunately, this is one-way because it will not import them.
Having used Office 2007 for several weeks, I have become used to it and, believe it or not, I actually like it! I shall probably continue to use it, under Windows XP, in preference to any of the other four word processors I have available. The $64,000 question, bearing in mind that, by the time you read this, Windows Vista may will be available, is whether I would advise anyone to install it along with Office 2007. The answer must be that I believe the combination will be great by the end of 2008. If you do not mind the odd glitch, then go for it, by all means; the system is already not bad. On the other hand, if you must have a rock stable system, with drivers available for everything, then wait and you will not be disappointed.
For my review section, I will take you through my adventures using the Net to understand better conductive anodic filaments (CAFs). Much ink has been used discussing whether CAFs are exacerbated by the processing conditions of lead-free techniques, possibly with good reason. In a former life, I did a bit of work on this subject, particularly with respect to high-density interconnects, where high voltage gradients can be formed with low applied voltages. For example, a 5V potential difference across a 50µm conductor spacing (and that is not the lower limit) gives a gradient of 100Vmm-1, which is far from negligible and may be sufficient to start CAF formation in some FR-4 laminates. Hence, my interest in presenting to you some on-line information on the subject.
www.cmap.ca/open/events/2002May_Reliability/presentations/Turbini%20CAF.pdf
Dr Laura Turbini is a CAF guru. When she was at Georgia Tech, in the early 1990s, we had numerous discussions on the subject and I think we both gained some insight into the problem over a meal or two. At the time, I was designing an instrument that would provoke and detect CAFs at different voltage gradients – this instrument worked well as a prototype but the principal for whom I was working never took it into production. Anyway, she is now Executive Director of the Centre for Microelectronics Assembly and Packaging in Toronto University Canada. This is a PowerPoint-style presentation in PDF format showing some of the fundamentals of CAF formation. Further on, there are some tables obviously relating the results of SIR and the number of CAFs, using various “flux formulations” at typical processing temperatures for lead- containing and lead-free processing. As it is not accompanied by any explanation other than the slides, the details are missing, but I presume the formulations are artificial mixtures of alkane polymers and either hydrochloric or hydrobromic acid. I will leave it to you to draw your conclusions.
nano.gtri.gatech.edu/pdfs/reprints/publications/PRICM_1998/materialsperspective_short.pdf
Written by the same pen, there is a much earlier paper from the time when Dr Turbini was at Georgia Tech. Although the URL suggests 1998 as the date of publication, I think she was already in Canada by then. Anyway, it describes some of her earlier work based on research she did five or six years earlier, as I understand it, but it is still perfectly valid work.
http://http://www.coretec-inc.com/products_technology/PC_Fab.asp
There are links to three magazine articles on CAFs, on this page. My advice is to ignore the first one because the author has difficulty discriminating between it and dendrites, as well as making such blunders as saying PTFE does not contain halogens! Quite the reverse, both the other two articles are worth the read. They are equally written by representatives from the laminate manufacturing industry and so are directly of interest to base material users, whether they be PCB manufacturers or assemblers – or even the end-users.
http://www.ami.ac.uk/courses/topics/0152_caf/index.html
This is another explanation of how CAFs are formed. It does not really bring in anything new, that has not appeared in the previous sites, and has obviously used much of Dr Turbini's publications as unacknowledged source. However, it is brief with good graphics, so might make a good starting point for newcomers to the subject.
www.parkelectro.com/parkelectro/images/CAF%20Article.pdf
This is an interesting four-page paper written by employees of another laminate manufacturer. The first, introductory, page is almost pure Turbini, but the other three pages are vastly interesting because they describe a series of tests undertaken under a wide range of conditions, some of which are unique. I like the way the authors state, “We need to address the CAF issue collectively as an industry since the root causes of CAF come from all areas on the electronics industry process and materials.” This may be an obvious truth, but one that is often ignored.
www.turi.org/content/content/download/3084/28596/file/Leo_Lambet.pps
This is a PowerPoint presentation of more recent date (2006), outlining the new side-issues imposed by the implementation of the RoHS Directive. I have known the author, Leo Lambert, for many years, since he was responsible for the technical side of the then Digital Equipment Corporation in Massachusetts and have a good respect for his knowledge. Only a part of this presentation is devoted to CAF, but it is worth going through the whole show. Interestingly, he footnotes his references on the bottom of each slide.
www.dfrsolutions.com/Articles/2001_HollowFibers_Hillman.Rogers.pdf
This is a short paper that brings out an oft-ignored aspect of CAF and possibly internal dendrites having an analogous effect, the fact that glass fibres used as laminate reinforcement may be hollow. It is very explicit as to how the fibres may sometimes be pipes, rather than the usual cylinders. Even better, it describes an illustrated test method showing how to detect hollow fibres by a variation in refractive index. I class this as mandatory reading for all interested in CAF formation.
Of course, I had to follow this reference, as it is one for a Circuit World paper. However, it is only an abstract. I extracted my full copy from the archives (it goes back more than two years) and read the paper on high performance laminates. There is a section on CAF testing, but, from this point of view only, the paper is not interesting as all five samples, which were tested, passed, so there is no discussion on a potential failure mechanism.
This reference is a shocker because it is a paper in a magazine devoted to military and aerospace applications, yet has a serious technical blunder. It describes CAFs as being composed of metallic copper. It shows that one must always question what one reads, even if you believe the source to be impeccable, as one would expect in this case. I cite this, not as a recommendation to read, but as an example of serious misinformation.
http://www.mew.co.jp/e/corp/news/2006/0601-02.htm
This is a purely commercial page for a laminate that the manufacturer claims has superior resistance to the formation of CAFs.
http://etd.gatech.edu/theses/available/etd-12082003-092951/
This is the title page for the master's thesis of one of Dr Turbini's graduates. A link may be found to the actual 140-odd page thesis at http://etd.gatech.edu/theses/available/etd-12082003-092951/unrestricted/ready_william_j_199701.pdf. The document is entitled “Factors which enhance CAF formation”. It is probably the most comprehensive scientific document on the phenomenon as was determined by research done about ten years ago. Of course, “lead-free” was a practically unknown buzzword at that time, so that testing at high soldering temperatures would not have been considered, so there are gaps not covered in this thesis when applied to modern techniques. Some of these gaps have been filled by a number of the references in the previous URLs in this poaper. For those wishing to go fairly deeply into the whys and wherefores of CAFs, this thesis should be read.
So, it seems evident that CAFs are becoming increasingly responsible for failures of electronic assemblies, partially because of the constraints of lead-free soldering and partially because of the ever-increasing component density and integration, forcing finer interconnect structures. We do not have all the answers yet, but the laminate manufacturer, the PCB fabricator and the assembler must all be very vigilant to minimise the risk of it occurring.
Brian EllisCyprusbne@bnellis.com