HP Labs: the Science of Technology
by Jarred Walton on July 1, 2014 6:00 AM EST- Posted in
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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.
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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.
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blackmagnum - Tuesday, July 1, 2014 - link
Please consider whether the pictures should accompany their relevant paragraphs to give the article a more attractive reading layout?gostan - Tuesday, July 1, 2014 - link
This tour shows you why HP is struggling. Look at those products! And of all the clips in this world, they picked Meg Whitman's interview!!??aaronjgoodrich - Thursday, July 3, 2014 - link
Explain your comment please? I can guess why you responded like you had.. but I would not like to assume. I need to hear you out first.HardwareDufus - Tuesday, July 1, 2014 - link
These guys work in Little dungeons... tiny Little isolated cubes... it's difficult to interact with each other... They need to open those spaces up in the Multimedia Lab and Software Testing Lab..vLsL2VnDmWjoTByaVLxb - Tuesday, July 1, 2014 - link
I know the software validation ain't that great as I was stuck with an Elitebook 850 G1 for 6 months that could barely operate after hibernation/sleep. Called HP for support and they were useless.ftp://ftp.hp.com/pub/softpaq//sp66001-66500/sp6611... Is the issue/fix in detail, long after HP had told me again and again it was on my side. Kinda shameful I wasted so many hours on trying to fix that or that a bug that large actually exists. HP used to be such a great engineering company!
aaronjgoodrich - Thursday, July 3, 2014 - link
Wait, so a software fix which was readily available but not applied to your system is "HP's" engineering issue? I think that's a common sense issue there. No hardware was failing. It was a software issue. Plain as day from the link you provided. Maybe you hadn't applied all the hotfixes/patches to the system you were working on? "Synaptics TouchPad/ForcePad Driver " isn't a problem with engineering of hardware. Synaptics isn't HP. Think again.NikAwesome - Wednesday, July 9, 2014 - link
They should be responsible because they chose that part. The whole "experience" should be tested and guaranteed by HP because it is their product. They care about HW and SW, that's why Apple has an enormous satisfaction customer ratio (at the cost of being proprietary and not-open, they are control freaks)NikAwesome - Wednesday, July 9, 2014 - link
Edit: They should be responsible because they chose that part. The whole "experience" should be tested and guaranteed by HP because it is their product. They SHOULD care about HW and SW, that's why Apple has an enormous satisfaction customer ratio (at the cost of being proprietary and not-open, they are control freaks)vLsL2VnDmWjoTByaVLxb - Thursday, July 31, 2014 - link
The issue existed for 5 months. I was able to repeat it on other hardware. HP refused to look into it. That is a breakdown in engineering AND support."No hardware was failing. It was a software issue."
You do realize that HP encompasses both sides of the spectrum, right?
"Maybe you hadn't applied all the hotfixes/patches to the system you were working on?"
I had, of course. That is newb 101 tech stuff to try, dude.
""Synaptics TouchPad/ForcePad Driver " isn't a problem with engineering of hardware. Synaptics isn't HP. "
One wonders why HP would allow faulty software to come with their hardware? Dual edged sword. HP lost quite a bit of revenue based on their response to this one issue. Engineering (improper validation for basic functionality) and support (Customer couldn't possibly be right on this one) fail.
Samus - Tuesday, July 1, 2014 - link
Coming from the family Tandy 1000SL 8086, my Dad knew I needed a new PC, one to myself, and one day he came home with a Compaq Prolinea 4/25s. My first PC.After a SoundBlasterCD kit to add audio and CD-ROM, 8MB memory upgrade and a 500MB Maxtor hard drive to upgrade the 120GB Quantum, it had seem to reach its limits.
Until I got a 486/75MHz overdrive chip for my birthday.
And what was really facinating about this upgrade was a jumper on the motherboard that selected between 25MHz and 33MHz. Curiously, I moved it to 33MHz, and all the sudden, I had a 486/100MHz Overdrive (something the PC wasn't, on paper, capable of.)
My first "overclock" and on an OEM system. That was a great PC. Eventually I ran OS/2 Warp, then Windows 95. Around the time Windows 98 came out, I built my first PC with an ASUS motherboard and an AMD K5 chip, which I also mildly overclocked to 120MHz from 100MHz. It wouldn't run 133MHz without eventually freezing ;)
Good times. Ever since, I've been a big fan of Compaq "enterprise-grade" hardware, which today we know as HP Proliant servers, the best selling servers in the world. They're annoyingly proprietary with their drive rails, Softpaq drivers, and torx screws, but having owned a Prolinea 20 years ago, I've been used to that since.
I'm glad to know a lot of the engineers that evaluated my first PC are still at HP. Because I found it at my parents house a few years ago and fired it up, and it booted right to the Windows 95 desktop with Rise of the Triad, Warcraft 2, and Big Red Racing for good measure.