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30
T E C H N O L O G Y
AMERICANWAY
NOVEMBER 15 2008
ILLUSTRATIONBYCHUCKANDERSON
If youcan’t stand theheat
(oranyotherpunishment),
don’tbotherventuring inside
Panasonic’s torturechamber.
ByTracyStaton
ENgINEERRobERtEstRAdA
leadstheway.
He skirts a cubicle warren, passes a Pana-
sonic copier, enters a hallway, then throws
open a set of double doors. The industrial
carpeting gives way to flecked gray lino-
leum. Black scuffsdot the sober graywalls.
“It’s the
GetSmart
part of the tour,”quips
KypWalls,directorofproductmanagement
for Panasonic Computer Solutions Compa-
ny inSecaucus,NewJersey.
At theendof the corridor, though, there’s
achambermuchmorehigh-tech thanagent
Maxwell Smart’s phone-booth elevator. Af-
tergoing throughyet onemoredoor,Estra-
da reaches it and steps in to showoff oneof
his raisons d’être: a roughly seven-square-
foot vault that can turn theair inside it into
tough
Enough
an Antarctic winter, more than 60 degrees
belowzero, and thenheat itup tomore than
200degreesFahrenheit,about the tempera-
tureof dinnerwhen it’shot out of theoven.
It’s aHighly Accelerated Life Test, a.k.a.
HALT, chamber— or, in layman’s terms, a
torture chamber— for computers.
TheHALT vault hasmetal-shelledwalls
about five inches thick and awindow about
a foot squareon three sides.A fewportholes
allow engineers to stick their (protected)
hands inside to tap keyboards and other-
wise assess any havoc. But havoc, of course,
is exactly what Estrada wants to avoid. As
a team leader for product engineering, Es-
trada is on amission tomake sure that ev-
erynewToughbookmodel comesoutof that
vault behaving as if there were not such a
thingas violent temperature swings.
Another engineer turns a valve and,
against the hiss and oscillating rumble of
a condenser, Estrada says, “It’s going to get
loud.”Only it already is, so “loud” is theonly
word audible over the noise. He points at a
monitor sitting on a stand just outside the
HALT vault and says, “See, the tempera-
ture’sdropping.”
He’sright, andnowonder:A jet streamof
supercooled nitrogen gusts into the cham-
ber, rattling the copper wires that connect
thecomputersoutside to thesensorswithin,
which are usually attached to at least one
Toughbook. The numbers on the screen
slidedownuntil it’s literally freezing inside.
