Much of the assessment was based on experience and the patient’s responses to carefully crafted questions – the tools would merely corroborate the answers – or vice versa.

X-Ray image of three tantalum capacitors (above). Only the part on the left is authentic, the other two are counterfeits that failed prematurely, causing a malfunction in a high-end medical instrument.

It’s unthinkable that our own health may be compromised by a chronically sick electronic printed circuit board (PCB) that fails to recognize a vital piece of information – but it’s the modern iatrogenic phenomenon.

(An iatrogenic condition is an injury or disease that results from a treatment or diagnostic failure and its significance to healthcare is now a research initiative at university level).


A crack in a ceramic capacitor will cause the component to short circuit.

Machines are an adjunct to human skill and, much like a human, their performance is generally enhanced when they are cared for, understood and treated with respect. An attentive operator will recognize the signals of aberrant behavior in a machine and respond to potential problems that are often forewarned by an audible or visual signal. But if there’s a failure in the absence of visible or tangible damage the cause may be beyond the scope of an owner/operator to diagnose and correct. 

Modern hospitals depend heavily on technology in anesthesia, dialysis, imaging, monitoring systems and radiography and the devices employed all contain thousands of individual electronic components. When the result of failure is damage or injury, there is usually a cost involved so the question is “where does the responsibility lie?” Is it user based, is there a corrupted semiconductor, a manufacturing defect or a cloned or counterfeit component – or is there an inherent weakness that can recur? 

There is a company in Ottawa that can provide all these answers with a detailed analysis of the failure – not merely to satisfy curiosity but more importantly to increase safety and reduce liability.

MuAnalysis Inc. (www.muanalysis.com) is a professional laboratory and analytical service providing expert analysis and solutions to the electronics, photonics, life sciences, and manufacturing industries. 

The broad expertise in failure analysis and reliability testing ranges from in-house semiconductor technology to include most electronic materials and emerging technologies such as gallium nitride (GaN) and silicon carbide (SiC). The specialized equipment of MuAnalysis and the range of scientific skills have attracted and captured a significant global market share. All the work is undertaken and handled in the strictest confidence within secure, monitored facilities – a written declaration of non-disclosure is part of the standard Terms and Conditions. 

An easy analogy is to compare MuAnalysis to a health service provider for electronics and semiconductor chips, isolating and identifying microcontaminants and analyzing the symptoms and defects resulting from manufacturing or process issues. 

Electronic components, like people, come in various shapes, sizes and ages and they need different specialists for their various conditions. They have health issues with hardware and software – we have issues with bodies and, in the parlance of modern psychology, “wetware” – the human operating system. And as with people, tests can be performed to verify that the patient is in good running order or to discover conditions that may ultimately cause failure. 

Chips usually die because of latent defects, or because they have been mishandled, often by the end user. For the definitive answer, the cause of death can be found when MuAnalysis, the forensic lab of electronics, performs an autopsy to explain the root cause – in a detailed analysis of demise.