Post by 1dave on Sept 7, 2020 14:57:10 GMT -7
Tin Whiskers grow from pure-tin-plated surfaces. They are microscopic metal fibers that cause electrical short-circuits and failures.
There is no cure for them, except to not use pure-tin-plated electronic components. This was known over fifty years ago, but the present generation lost that knowledge until recently.
The failures that they are now causing have made them a clear and present danger to the technological foundation and infrastructure of the entire world.
Tin Whiskers are microscopic single-crystal metal fibers, thinner than a human hair, capable of bridging great distances between leads on electronic components, and creating short-circuits and failures. They are almost invisible to the eye, needing magnification and special lighting to be seen.
They are real.
People in the general public arena are beginning to talk about them. Here is a recent Slashdot post:
Tin whiskers - fact or fiction? 2008-06-13 10:09 bLanark Submitted by bLanark on Friday June 13, @10:09AM
Some time ago, most electronics were soldered with old-fashioned lead solder, which has been tried and tested for decades. In 2006, the EU banned lead in solder, and so most manufacturers switched to a lead-free solder. Most made the switch in advance, I guess due to shelf-life of products and ironing out problems working with the new material.
Lead is added to solder as it melts at low temperature, but also, it prevents the solder from growing "whiskers" — crystalline limbs of metal.
The affect of whiskers on soldered equipment would include random short-circuits and strange RF-effects. Whiskers can grow fairly quickly and become quite long
Robert Cringley wrote up this some time ago, and, it seems that the world has *not* been taking notice. I guess cars (probably around 30 processors in a modern car) and almost every appliance would be liable to fail sooner than expected due to tin whiskers. Note that accelerated life-expectancy tests can't simulate the passing of time for whiskers to grow.
I've googled and there is plenty of research into the effects of tin whiskers. I should point out that the wikipedia page linked to above states that tin whisker problems "are negligible in modern alloys", but can we trust Wikipedia?
So, my question is: was the tin whisker problem overhyped, was it an initial problem that has been solved in the few years since lead-free solder came into use, or is it affecting anyone already?
To answer the last question, let us just say that Wikipedia material can be posted by anyone and can be edited by anyone.
What it means to the average consumer is that your brand new wide-screen television set will likely fail in only a few years, due to tin whiskers growing from one lead to another on the integrated circuits inside it. Most have only a one-year warranty.
The consumer buys a wide range of products containing electronics, ranging from cars to cellphones to coffee-makers to computers.
The pure-tin-plated electronics are inside not only consumer products but industrial products such as computers which are the workhorse of modern business, and routers that are the backbone of the Internet, modern data storage and retrieval systems, telecommunicatons systems, nuclear- and conventional-power-plant control systems, automobiles, just about anything with electronics in it. All are at risk, and all can (and do) fail from this cause.
There is a clear and present danger to our society from the advent of pure-tin-plated electronic components and the attendant Tin Whiskers. The NASA website nepp.nasa.gov/whisker/ gives scientific facts about the history of failures (except those that manufacturers don’t want to be made public), satellite failures and their costs, what we know and what we don't, about what causes them and what cures them.
Here's the bottom line: We do not fully understand what causes them. Not even by half. Worse, we cannot cure them.
They are a disaster-in-the-making. They have destroyed billions of dollars worth of satellites. They have created "incidents" at nuclear power plants, including a false shut-down command at the Millstone nuclear reactor in Millstone, Connecticut about two years ago. What if that false logic signal had been a command to "Slam Full On!" instead of "Slam Full Off!"? Would we have had a meltdown such as Three Mile Island, or even Chernobyl? I hope not, but no one knows.
Then, there's the implanted pacemakers, diagnostic and life-support medical equipment. The medical electronics community is VERY concerned about this. The jokes about recalling implanted pacemakers aren't funny.
We (American and foreign components manufacturers, many with offices in U. S. jurisdiction) created them by plating our electronic component leads with pure tin. Having done that, there is no known cure for the resulting tin whiskers and the electronic failures they create. THERE IS NO CURE to prevent tin whiskers from growing, unless you get rid of the pure tin. Even if someone claimed to have invented a metal alloy or surface-treatment that would magically stop them, how do you prove it? These things take many months to many years, even ten years or more, to grow and do their damage.....and then the communications satellite dies, one of the computers controlling your automobile operations fails and perhaps the brakes jam on at high-speed on a freeway.....who knows what happens when there's a random computer malfunction? How do you prove there’s not one chance in a thousand of something not happening in ten years, or even three? How many years does it take to “prove “ that, while our infrastructure and the products of our civilization crumble around us at a faster and faster rate?
It takes forever to prove that something won't happen. The cure is not to continue to experiment and do research, year after year. There will NEVER be enough time to prove that tin whiskers will not grow out of some specially-treated version of tin.
This civilization made a tremendous blunder, and now we know the consequences of that blunder. Something happened: Tin Whiskers.
Remember the "Blue-Screen-Of-Death" when the early versions of Windows failed and you lost all your computer work? Tin Whiskers represent an Early Warning for our civilization and the electronics infrastructure on which it depends for road traffic lights, air traffic flight control and more. If we do not deal effectively with this now, the future is Blue.
There is no cure for them, except to not use pure-tin-plated electronic components. This was known over fifty years ago, but the present generation lost that knowledge until recently.
The failures that they are now causing have made them a clear and present danger to the technological foundation and infrastructure of the entire world.
Tin Whiskers are microscopic single-crystal metal fibers, thinner than a human hair, capable of bridging great distances between leads on electronic components, and creating short-circuits and failures. They are almost invisible to the eye, needing magnification and special lighting to be seen.
They are real.
People in the general public arena are beginning to talk about them. Here is a recent Slashdot post:
Tin whiskers - fact or fiction? 2008-06-13 10:09 bLanark Submitted by bLanark on Friday June 13, @10:09AM
Some time ago, most electronics were soldered with old-fashioned lead solder, which has been tried and tested for decades. In 2006, the EU banned lead in solder, and so most manufacturers switched to a lead-free solder. Most made the switch in advance, I guess due to shelf-life of products and ironing out problems working with the new material.
Lead is added to solder as it melts at low temperature, but also, it prevents the solder from growing "whiskers" — crystalline limbs of metal.
The affect of whiskers on soldered equipment would include random short-circuits and strange RF-effects. Whiskers can grow fairly quickly and become quite long
Robert Cringley wrote up this some time ago, and, it seems that the world has *not* been taking notice. I guess cars (probably around 30 processors in a modern car) and almost every appliance would be liable to fail sooner than expected due to tin whiskers. Note that accelerated life-expectancy tests can't simulate the passing of time for whiskers to grow.
I've googled and there is plenty of research into the effects of tin whiskers. I should point out that the wikipedia page linked to above states that tin whisker problems "are negligible in modern alloys", but can we trust Wikipedia?
So, my question is: was the tin whisker problem overhyped, was it an initial problem that has been solved in the few years since lead-free solder came into use, or is it affecting anyone already?
To answer the last question, let us just say that Wikipedia material can be posted by anyone and can be edited by anyone.
What it means to the average consumer is that your brand new wide-screen television set will likely fail in only a few years, due to tin whiskers growing from one lead to another on the integrated circuits inside it. Most have only a one-year warranty.
The consumer buys a wide range of products containing electronics, ranging from cars to cellphones to coffee-makers to computers.
The pure-tin-plated electronics are inside not only consumer products but industrial products such as computers which are the workhorse of modern business, and routers that are the backbone of the Internet, modern data storage and retrieval systems, telecommunicatons systems, nuclear- and conventional-power-plant control systems, automobiles, just about anything with electronics in it. All are at risk, and all can (and do) fail from this cause.
There is a clear and present danger to our society from the advent of pure-tin-plated electronic components and the attendant Tin Whiskers. The NASA website nepp.nasa.gov/whisker/ gives scientific facts about the history of failures (except those that manufacturers don’t want to be made public), satellite failures and their costs, what we know and what we don't, about what causes them and what cures them.
Here's the bottom line: We do not fully understand what causes them. Not even by half. Worse, we cannot cure them.
They are a disaster-in-the-making. They have destroyed billions of dollars worth of satellites. They have created "incidents" at nuclear power plants, including a false shut-down command at the Millstone nuclear reactor in Millstone, Connecticut about two years ago. What if that false logic signal had been a command to "Slam Full On!" instead of "Slam Full Off!"? Would we have had a meltdown such as Three Mile Island, or even Chernobyl? I hope not, but no one knows.
Then, there's the implanted pacemakers, diagnostic and life-support medical equipment. The medical electronics community is VERY concerned about this. The jokes about recalling implanted pacemakers aren't funny.
We (American and foreign components manufacturers, many with offices in U. S. jurisdiction) created them by plating our electronic component leads with pure tin. Having done that, there is no known cure for the resulting tin whiskers and the electronic failures they create. THERE IS NO CURE to prevent tin whiskers from growing, unless you get rid of the pure tin. Even if someone claimed to have invented a metal alloy or surface-treatment that would magically stop them, how do you prove it? These things take many months to many years, even ten years or more, to grow and do their damage.....and then the communications satellite dies, one of the computers controlling your automobile operations fails and perhaps the brakes jam on at high-speed on a freeway.....who knows what happens when there's a random computer malfunction? How do you prove there’s not one chance in a thousand of something not happening in ten years, or even three? How many years does it take to “prove “ that, while our infrastructure and the products of our civilization crumble around us at a faster and faster rate?
It takes forever to prove that something won't happen. The cure is not to continue to experiment and do research, year after year. There will NEVER be enough time to prove that tin whiskers will not grow out of some specially-treated version of tin.
This civilization made a tremendous blunder, and now we know the consequences of that blunder. Something happened: Tin Whiskers.
Remember the "Blue-Screen-Of-Death" when the early versions of Windows failed and you lost all your computer work? Tin Whiskers represent an Early Warning for our civilization and the electronics infrastructure on which it depends for road traffic lights, air traffic flight control and more. If we do not deal effectively with this now, the future is Blue.
