How do electronics eventually break? Do the connections on the motherboard get weaker or thinner over time?
In: Technology
Sometimes solder connections aren’t very strong, and they corrode slightly, which breaks a connection. Sometimes (if it’s an item that sees temperature or humidity fluctuations) the environmental fluctuations will cause problems. There may be corrosion in power connections, there might be physical failure of an electrical connection from expansion and contraction…
Sometimes individual components will fail. Electrolytic capacitors can fail, because they’re complex for their size (layers of foil, insulators, and liquid parts).
As electronics get smaller, their power demands decrease. The electrical paths (wiring, circuit board traces, and the internal traces in integrated circuits) are smaller by _a lot_ than in 1980s electronics. Older electronics were more robust, but required more power.
The delicate nature of more modern electronics can cause them to fail in ways that aren’t apparent, since variation in electronic components may happen inside an integrated circuit, or somewhere invisible to the user.
Time, environment, and random chance make a difference.
I have a GPS unit in my car that is actively dying, and the circuits that provide the information are fine. The display, however, is losing contact with the circuit board. The connections for those are often a conductive rubber strip, adhered to the contacts of the display. I can squeeze the sides of the GPS and the map displayed clears up, but it’s clear that the age of the GPS is there. It’s fallen off my windshield a lot, which seems to have loosened a lot of connections.
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