How do electronics eventually break? Do the connections on the motherboard get weaker or thinner over time?
In: Technology
OK – lets set some expectations. Industrial electronics will last 20 years or more and work nearly 100% of the time when they are being used. That is a hell of a record for any machine, as electronics are still simply machines. So yes, the circuit boards can get rickety but a well constructed one will last forever, and I am not joking about that they just don’t go bad nearly as often as we give it credit for. I ran a phone system (an Avaya with MaBell scratched off and Avaya penciled in) with massive digital cards that were installed in 1993 and they lasted until the phone system was retired in 2013. The system had never been rebooted.
That is best case scenario, the electronics are robustly made and are in environmentally controlled areas. If the magic smoke (look it up) escapes, it is usually because a meatbag spilled water on it, plugged the wrong kind of power into it, or dropped it. Occasionally a surge will happen from grid power, that normally blows up a power supply instead of the circuit card itself. I have replaced electronics that were hit by lightning, I don’t care if you have the grounding cable properly seated and the power supply is designed to fail open, that much static electricity will blow up the circuit card.
So, barring the obvious, the issue is normally not with the circuits themselves, it is with the software programming. Simple programming lasts forever, complex programming eventually breaks down if it isn’t patched. There is a term for this in CS called ‘software rot’. Think of it as entropy specific to software. Without modification, eventually the code will rot out. If it is simple it will last a lifetime, the more complex it gets the more likely to suffer this entropy.
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