non-mechanical computer components and potential damage through vibrations

[Turbonium]

Think of the computer parts you ordered, in the back of the courier truck, while the truck hits a huge pothole or speedbump. Or perhaps the delivery guy accidentally drops the box containing the parts from shoulder height. Or perhaps you shipped with UPS (lol 😛).

How come this sort of thing isn't understood to damage components like say a CPU, RAM, or a motherboard? Can you not get microscopic damage of sorts in the silicon or even PCB through indirect shock? I mean, it's a wave of (kinetic?) energy propagating through the material's atoms, right? And aren't transistors, for one, just a few dozen atoms wide at the most at current processes? How about when they approach the width of just a few atoms or less?

Feel free to get technical with the physics of things.

 

[sourn]

Unfortunately I'm not that smart to get technical. But imo it comes down to the way it's packed. They know it's getting shipped, not hand carried to you. So they pack accordingly which keeps the stuff inside the package getting knocked around to much. Then it's a simple matter of the material taking the force then the actual device. This is why things are normally packed really tight, and they use foam/bubble to fill in the dead space.

 

[Turbonium]

Unfortunately I'm not that smart to get technical. But imo it comes down to the way it's packed. They know it's getting shipped, not hand carried to you. So they pack accordingly which keeps the stuff inside the package getting knocked around to much. Then it's a simple matter of the material taking the force then the actual device. This is why things are normally packed really tight, and they use foam/bubble to fill in the dead space.

I used the example of shipping through a courier as an example.

Take the example of newer Intel CPUs: the boxes they come in make it so that they're practically exposed (you can see the CPU through the plastic casing of the packaging). I'm sure every now and again, you get something smacking up or applying pressure against that same packaging, yet no damage (supposedly) happens, or I'd imagine they wouldn't have designed the packaging to be like that.

Another example: say you have a computer on the floor in the room of a house. Underneath that room, directly underneath the computer, there is a heavy garage door or something. The garage door, when closed, always shakes the floor above it noticeably. This same vibration is obviously being translated into the computer chassis and all its components.

Yet another example: a laptop. You sit there typing away. The resultant vibrations travel throughout the system just a few millimeters below the keyboard (CPU and everything). You may even slam the keyboard at times during bouts of nerd rage while gaming. Yet nothing is really damaged. In fact, like the garage door example above, everything continues to function unaltered, transistors and all, at the same time that the vibrations travel through the material.

Doesn't repeated exposure to this sort of thing cause damage in anything, let alone circuitry? I realize this may be a bit of a silly question, but I'm really curious. And I'd imagine the answer is as fundamental/obvious and basic as the reason why solid objects don't go through one another, despite consisting mostly of empty space (yay physics).

 

[HibyPrime1]

A big part of the reason is that when you get to very small scales, large scale forces are pretty much the same everywhere.

Imagine subjecting your house to a vibration with a wavelength of 10 meters. If you look at an object in your house that is one meter across, it will only be experiencing one tenth of the wave at any particular time. If you go smaller and smaller, you'll find that you can't even see the vibration wave at any particular point in time, because you're looking at smaller and smaller fractions of it.

It's like if you take a circle, and then zoom in 10000x on one piece of it all you will see is a straight line, not a curve.

So now if you were to blow that up, it's the equivalent of throwing a baseball. The whole baseball sees the same force at any given time, so it doesn't break up into pieces.

The other reason has to do with the square-cube law. If you scale an object by 2x it's mass increases by 4x. It's the same reason that you can build a 1 foot tall building out of lego and have it be perfectly stable to a (relative) giant pounding on it, but if you built a skyscraper out of lego it would crumble just from wind.

 

[Braznor]

Packing dampens down the vibration to a large extent.

If you pack something tightly within a bigger box with bubble foam tightly enclosing the inner package from all the sides, any vibration which is imparted to the outside box is severely dampened.

For instance, consider a delicate object packed as above. If someone drops such a package, the shock should be ideally distributed to the bubble foam rather than being directly transferred to the inner box or its contents. At the moment of actual impact to the outer box, the shock will probably cause the bubble foam in the direction of the force to contract/deform in such a way that the deformation is distributed across the foam layer than transferred to the inner box.

Say a package has six sides A, B, C, D, E, F with both the sides of the inner box and the outer box having the same name designation. If the outer box falls downwards with side D facing the ground, at the moment of actual impact with the ground, the foam bubbles sandwiched between inner box Side D and outer box Side D experience deformation due to force from two directions i.e. upward compressive force from outer box side D due to sudden deceleration and downward compressive force from inner box side D because of the weight of the contents of inner box which is still in motion due to the fall. The unique property of the foam bubbles lies in absorbing both these upward and downward compressive forces by expanding sideways, thus buffering the inner box from the impact of the fall to a great extent.

The trick here is to ensure that the bubble foam layer deforms itself protecting the contents within.

 

[Eureka]

The other reason has to do with the square-cube law. If you scale an object by 2x it's mass increases by 4x. It's the same reason that you can build a 1 foot tall building out of lego and have it be perfectly stable to a (relative) giant pounding on it, but if you built a skyscraper out of lego it would crumble just from wind.

This is probably the best reason why microscopic circuitry doesn't damage as easily. When you think of damage, you generally apply it to yourself. However, you should realize that large forces actually affect you as a person more than it does a small object.

It's also the same reason why you can hit a fly with a flyswatter and it can live, but if you got hit by a giant flyswatter you'd be obliterated. Or why an ant can fall from 10 feet and survive and you can't. Inertia sucks.