The Tin-Whisker Menace

An anonymous reader writes "Fortune has an article about how the recent environmental push to completely eliminate lead from electronic components and wiring may eventually lead to the next Y2K problem of slowly-growing tin whiskers short-circuiting equipment.""

Comments

Re:I wonder...

[notany]

This is whre progress is going. For example Prof. David Patterson (inventor of RAID and first MISC instruction set computers) has been trying to do this many years. See IRAM

There is some practical problems.

1. Low yield. Failure rate grows with bigger chips. Makes them more expensive.
2. Harder to make. Different prosesses for making memory and logic (this has been done already of course).
3. Heat problem. It's easier to cool separaate chunks of prosessor, graphics processor and memory.
4. Upgrading. New usb spec, make new mask. Upgrade graphics prosessor, make new mask. New mask for every memory configuration. Uh.

We may get close eventually. Practicality may dictate that we end up with 1-3 chips per home PC. Maybe optical connections between.

My time estimate for this to happen is 10-30 years from now.

Temperature cycling

[NoseBag]

When I worked in the E-Warfare division of (deleted) we ran into this issue whenever we used brass prototype packages to house circuits. The cause of the whisker growth (in brass) was the repeated temperature cycling (TC) of the package. Apparently in the presence of the TC, the tin in the brass preferentially crystalized out of the brass in whisker form and pushed out of the sides. Kinda neat, actually, except for the occasional power supply short. We found that a solid nickel-plate or copper-plate fixed the problem nicely.