Tin Whiskers — Fact Or Fiction?

bLanark writes "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 effect 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 this up this some time ago, but 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: 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?"

Comments

Does it matter?

[NerveGas]

Cars, televisions, players, music, computers... are there really any electronics intended to last 30 years any more?

Re:Does it matter?

[Anonymous Coward]

I know of $100M electronic devices orbiting 23,500 miles out in space which would indeed live 30 years if the tin whiskers don't kill them first.

Re:Does it matter?

[zilym]

OMG, a Sony device that still works properly after its short warranty has expired! They sure don't make 'em like they used to.

Re:Does it matter?

[squiggleslash]

There really aren't that many consumer electronics items from the 1950s and 1960s in general use, even when they're compatible with "current" standards. The exception are a few items, like those you mention, that were expensive then and are expensive now. There were hundreds - possible thousands - of millions of radios and TVs made during that time, for example. These are 100% electronic items, unlikely to have failed due to mechanical problems (wear and tear), nor incompatible (in practice) with current standards and systems. Where are they now?

There are items made today that will still be in use in 40 years time, but the number is small, and as with the previous example, they'll be the obscure, highly priced, built-by-craftsmen objects. The "decline in quality" meme is a myth. If it's built in a factory, for the mass market, it isn't - and never has been - in the manufacturer's best interests to make it last for more than a decade. Exceptions exist - but they'll always exist. And, to be honest, there's a remarkable amount of stuff hitting landfills these days not because it fails to function as designed, but because it's obsolete. I suspect the number of 8088-based PCs that could still be working if their owners hadn't put them in the trash would probably number in the tens of millions. And that was hardly an industry where quality was considered a priority.

Re:Does it matter?

[nasch]

Yes, your anecdotal evidence is compelling. I am sure it's quite safe to extrapolate from your sample of two, and conclude that most American cars will need multiple ECU replacements.

Please tell me I do not need sarcasm tags for this post.

Built-in obsolescence

[Stiletto]

Look at it from the manufacturer's point of view. There's a chance that any piece of consumer electronics is now going to wear out and die even faster, causing people to buy replacements more frequently. Sounds like a great deal for the manufacturer with no downside. They don't have to pay to dispose of these things properly. And no, chucking your old electronics in the trash is not the proper way of disposing of them, unless you like cadmium, mercury, hexavalent chromium, and brominated flame retardants seeping into your drinking water.

Make manufacturers bear the ENTIRE cost of properly and safely disposing of their products, and overnight we'd have cleaner, greener, more long-lasting and durable products.

Re:Built-in obsolescence

[Chineseyes]

Make manufacturers bear the ENTIRE cost of properly and safely disposing of their products, and overnight we'd have cleaner, greener, more long-lasting and durable products.

Very idealistic of you but manufacturers will NEVER bear the cost, it will be passed on to the consumer who will then bitch and moan to their government representation that they are being gouged. The manufacturers will then play the victim, "It's the big bad government restricting our ability to provide you with cheap goods". Now Mr. John Q. Politician is stuck in a real crap hole because the next election is coming up soon and his constituents are angry at him because they are paying what they perceive is too much for certain goods. Also the manufacturers lobby who funded his last campaign are threatening to fund his competition who has promised to rescind any laws that keep the manufacturers from doing business as usual. To compound John Q. Politician's problems the manufacturers are saying they will have to move their factories to more friendly territory in Asia so they can continue to stay competitive providing cheap goods. This would cause thousands of jobs to be lost among Mr John Q. Politicians constituency and many thousands more job losses among the constituency of his colleagues who will refuse to endorse him if he goes against a bill that will hurt their own chances of re-election.

Now he is facing pressure from his constituency, lobbyists, and even his own colleagues.

What do you suppose Mr. Politician does? Stick to his guns and fight the good fight? Hell no he doesn't. He votes to rescind any law that forces the manufacturers to bear any costs that will be pushed onto consumers. Why? because if he doesn't he will be voted out of office and the guy who takes his office will do what he refused to.

Is it right? No. Do I agree with it? No. But thats the way it is.

Re:Built-in obsolescence

[The Man]

Dunno about him but I'm happy to bear the cost. Figure out the cheapest way to recycle or dispose of these things properly, then add that to the price and let me put it in the bin with the rest of my rubbish (or a separate one as with other recyclables). That system is simple and convenient and it provides the correct incentives. What we have now is a system in which it is often illegal to dispose of something but no alternative is available and, where one is, I have no pricing information to determine whether I'm getting jobbed. Meanwhile most people keep throwing the stuff into landfills and polluting everyone's water supplies. This is a no-brainer.

Re:Built-in obsolescence

[Vellmont]

Very idealistic of you but manufacturers will NEVER bear the cost, it will be passed on to the consumer who will then bitch and moan to their government representation that they are being gouged.

It worked for catalytic converters, (and as a result unleaded gas). It's worked for low-sulphur diesel. It's worked for air bags. All of those examples likely cause higher prices for consumers that are passed on from manufacturers. I recall auto makers making these exact same arguments against airbags, and nowadays people are afraid of any used car without them. I don't recall any politicians being thrown out of office for making these requirements.

I'm sure there were some naysayers, there always are. The trick is you just have to sell it to the public. Not everyone is a dumbass that only cares about saving a few pennies on electronics.

Right now it's a pain in the ass to get rid of electronics. A lot of garbage collectors won't take them. Cities sometimes do, but you have to bring them to a special collection place, often many miles away and open odd hours. Put something in the legislation that anyone that sells electronics has to also take them for recycling. In Minnesota (and likely other states) we already do this for motor oil.

Re:Built-in obsolescence

[ekhben]

... but manufacturers will NEVER bear the cost, it will be passed on to the consumer ...

Not holding the manufacturers responsible merely keeps the cost hidden, it doesn't get rid of it.

Re:obvious answer

[Ottair]

I used to buy into Wikipedia's stated ethos until I realized that any one person can (and all too frequently do) hijack articles to push and protect their point of view and once that happens you can forget about the "Five Pillars" and objectivity.

Re:lead free solder

[kurthr]

Yes, because all connections, switches, and transistors are tested by a JTAG boundary scan...
LOL! You've never heard of Analog?

Visual inspection is key to debugging crucial and intermittent errors due to things like badly soldered bypass caps and ground bounce. Put that in your JTAG and smoke it.

Built in obsolescence

[nurb432]

If your computer has a limited life expectancy, then you have to buy a new one at some point. So why would they 'fix' the problem ?

Re:Tin Whiskers are fact

[angel'o'sphere]

Sorry you might be perfectly right, but fail to understand how a whisker can cause a short. If at all the soldering point might "break" and cause a stop in current, but a short? With what exactly should it short cut? This really sounds like a myth.

angel'o'sphere

Re:Tin Whiskers are fact

[veranikon]

It takes *very little* current to short a FET gate, i.e. microamps or less. Indeed, compare the geometry of these whiskers to the tracks etched on silicon. Not every bit of metal exposed on a PCB will carry current large enough to fuse these whiskers before they cause disruption. Furthermore, chip-scale assembly techniques likes BGA will give you plenty of areas with large blobs of solder within convenient whisker distance of each other.

As referenced in another comment, NASA Goddard Space Flight Center does indeed seem pretty concerned:
http://nepp.nasa.gov/WHISKER/

How would we know?

[supabeast!]

These days everything electronic is slapped together on assembly lines in third-world crapholes. How are we supposed to know the difference between tin whisker failures or the device being made with adulterated materials in a factory full of former cabbage farmers?

Ice spikes

[Fry-kun]

What's interesting is, nobody seems to draw a parallel between spikes that appear when clear water is frozen and tin whiskers.
Something very similar happens - as the temperature goes down, spikes/whiskers appear. It only happens in pure or near-pure water. And it's a well established fact (although not well understood until recently).

This is too much of a coincidence to not investigate it.

Re:Cars

[couchslug]

"Probably we don't have any major car manufacturer sued because nobody ever cares to examine cars electronics after accidents. It's so easy to blame the drunk/distract/incompetent driver."

Especially when they ARE drunk/distracted/incompetent.

Automobile systems are very well designed to fail gracefully or just not matter much when they crap out. (That's also why drive-by-wire is a stupid idea.)

The average car is driven by a mechanical illiterate who barely maintains it (washing does not count) and is designed accordingly. I am an experienced mechanic and know whereof I speak. :)

Re:I wouldn't go that far

[Anonymous Coward]

I had an administrator remove factual, documented information from an article because it didn't jive with the rest of the obviously biased article. Links (to article, edit history, and discussion page) or it didn't happen.

Re:I wouldn't go that far

[Anonymous Coward]

Low-traffic articles nobody cares about are very vulnerable to this kind of abuse though.

And if you think about it, low-traffic articles wouldn't even appear in old-style dictionaries like Encyclopaedia Brittanica (basically by definition). So even if every low-traffic article was abused, it's still a net win (assuming that it's better to know something half-true than to know nothing at all).

Re:I wouldn't go that far

[D'Sphitz]

Yep, if I went to a "legitimate" encyclopedia rather than Wikipedia i'd guess 99% or more of the topics I look up every day wouldn't be there at all.

I don't get all the hate for Wikipedia. So it's not perfect, well neither is the Encyclopedia Britannica, but for me Wikipedia is the single most useful resource on the internet second only to Google, and even that may be a tossup because Google often just links me to a Wikipedia page. I'm there dozens of times every day, whether it be looking up something I saw on TV, an actor's name, a musician's discography, or something I just read about.

It's a shame such a valuable resource takes so much heat. Maybe it has its problems but it's alot more accurate and alot less opinionated than the average webpage you'll find on any given topic, and honestly it doesn't really matter to me that the article on Chevy Chase hasn't been published in a scientific journal for peer review.

Re:I wouldn't go that far

[csnydermvpsoft]

On Wikipedia, the truth is what the Admins says is the truth.

And that's different than a commercial information source how?

Re:I wouldn't go that far

[DaveV1.0]

Commercial sources don't claim to use the so-called wisdom of crowds.

Commercial sources don't say anyone can edit the entries.

Re:I wouldn't go that far

[KGIII]

To play the devil's advocate, I'd argue that no information is better than dis-information or mis-information because then people are free to research on their own and draw their own conclusions as opposed to being fed incorrect (or biased and not entirely true) information.

Re:Is lead truly that dangerous ?

[budgenator]

back in the day I would sometimes hold the solder in my mouth when I needed an extra "hand"

But they buy components from somewhere...

[mengel]

As TFA points out, the military folks must buy their components from somewhere, and the parts suppliers are shipping tin-coated components...

So even if they get to use leaded solder, they can get whiskers on their components...

Re:obvious answer

[SmokeyTheBalrog]

> but can we trust Wikipedia?

No. lol I must agree with parent and say, he isn't flame baiting.

Wikipedia works well as one of the first sites to go to for information. But it is no Silver Bullet and should never be one's only source.

I believe a newspaper writer based an article on information in a Wikipedia article only to discover (after it was published) that the Wiki had been vandalized. The most the most amusing modification stated that the person they were writing about had died. I'm sure the writer was surprised when he got an angry phone call from his supposedly deceased subject matter.

A watched article is safer, but still not something that should be blindly trusted.

Re:I wouldn't go that far

[packeteer]

You're right. Commercial sources claim to be fact checked very carefully. Commercial sources claim to be strictly unbiased.

Wikipedia strives for those goals but at least you are not deluded into thinking they are there.

Re:More stupid laws thanks to paranoia.

[rrohbeck]

The whole WEEE/RoHS thing originated in Europe but then other states/countries got on the bandwagon too.
Smog is more of a problem in many areas of the US. And every time some politicians try to do something about it everybody screams about the costs. In Europe the politicians have data about the effect of bad air on e.g. childrens' health. In the US, they have data about the effect on the economy.

Science is testable.

[tjstork]

hat is, no one ever really knows anything about the Universe other than what they're told, and what they can work out in terms of internal consistency checks on what they're told.

I have to disagree with this statement. Science, properly applied, gives mankind the tools to know things based directly on his or her experience.

The beauty of good science is that you DON'T have to trust someone else's eyes. You can trust your own. While you may not discover the Higg's Boson or some other exotic subatomic particle in your own home, there is a surprising amount of fairly important experimental evidence that is cheap to do, that you can do yourself.

Take for instance the solar system. Sure, Ptolemy could be ok if all you wanted was planetary timetables, but, then there's the occasional cases where they would be wrong, and for increased accuracy, you need Kepler for the ellipse and then Newton ultimately for calculus based gravity, and then when you want to get really accurate, you need Einstein to consider various relativistic effects. In each of those cases, the edges are well defined and serve as a model of where to look, and in all of the above cases, all you are doing is taking a decent telescope and a CCD camera and seeing where things are in the sky.

Even at the smaller levels of physics, you can decide for yourself. You don't have to say that you are not sure if Maxwell or others were on the mark - you can take iron filings on top of a magnet and a piece of paper, move the thing around, and see that, yeah, all he's doing is describing in calculus the field that you see. You can follow in Einstein's footsteps and see the photoelectric effect by yourself - with a simple solar cell. You can perform the double slit experiment with sand and with water and then even light, and that's basically going to give you a pretty good heads up on quantum physics. Even the gold foil experiment is probably not out of reach for the determined amateur.

Re:Exception

[bgackle]

Avionics was exempt as well, but the actual exemptions are useless. All the high volume consumer applications have gone lead free, so the economic incentive isn't there for component manufacturers to produce non lead-free parts. In practice, everyone gets to follow the ipods and use lead-free parts. Makes one wonder whether the environmental gain from eliminating (relatively stable) metalic lead from landfills will be far outweighed by the flood of prematurely failed electronics.

Wikipedia..nope you can't trust it...

[Evil Kerek]

I'm so happy to see you ask this question.

As I've pointed out several times, it can't be trusted. It's only as accurate as the last person to edit it and you have NO way to know if the last person was an idiot, a corporate sponser or someone that actually knew what they were talking about. That said, let's dissect a bit further - those of you that consider yourself experts in your field - how many of the people around you in that field do you actually think know nearly as much as you do? Exactly.

And of course once the subject becomes a little bit fuzzy (global warming, Iraq war, oil drilling) all bets are off with the liberal edit most likely winning (or the points of view of the various 'neutral' overlord editors).

EK

Re:I wouldn't go that far

[NeoSkandranon]

Yeah, that stops it. Unless, of course, one of the administrators takes over an article and enforces his point of view, which I have seen.

I had an administrator remove factual, documented information from an article because it didn't jive with the rest of the obviously biased article.

On Wikipedia, the truth is what the Admins says is the truth. Citation needed.

The next big thing

[phorm]

I think that this might be partly because, by the time a lot of this stuff breaks down, it's somewhat obsolete and a new, bigger model is out.

27" TV breaks after 3 years, don't worry, now you can get a 32" for less than the old one cost.

Your 1.6Ghz Pentium-M laptop died... no worries the new Dual-Core Centrino is $100 less and a whole lot faster.


I find this happens a lot in terms of computer hardware. I have a 2.8Ghz P-4 laptop myself that has been kicking around for longer than expected (HP Pavillion zx7000): drive still works, no dead pixels, etc. I've been thinking on getting a newer laptop for quite awhile but for now I think I'm just going to keep this one until it dies.

To be fair, I keep good care of my machine by regularly dusting it out to make sure all the fans are running, not blocking the intakes etc. After seeing how a lot of people handle their electronic equipment I'd say that cheap manufacture is only part of the problem.

Jury is still out

[sjames]

Really the Wikipedia article says the jury is still out. Since the tin whisker problem develops over time and the formulations that meet ROHS are new, we have no idea how it will play out in the coming years.

I wouldn't be at ALL surprised if ROHS creates a sort of landfill doomsday in a few years where the levels of electronic waste skyrocket due to failures.

The real way to be more green is to ban crappy gear that ends up in the landfill after a couple years. Want to cut hazardous landfill by 2/3? Make the useful life 3 times longer! Take the weasels that build in obsolescence and actually expend extra time and money to make sure the existing device can't be upgraded out back and shoot them (with steel bullets so we don't pollute the graveyard :-)

Imagine the number of devices in the landfill just because replacement LCD screens are made of pure unobtanium or very deliberately priced just below the cost of a whole new device (or occasionally MORE than the cost of a new device).

Re:Well here are a few facts...

[JoeMerchant]

Economic and political reality strikes again.

I found the zero tolerance aspects of RoHS particularly amusing in light of these kinds of glaring exceptions..... You there, with 0.2 micrograms of lead in your alloy, that's got to go! Oh, sir, yes, there's no other way but to put 50lbs of lead in this battery, we understand.

All in all, RoHS is a noble sentiment, and will eventually do a lot of good - it's just going to be an interesting ride while some of the unknowns get worked out... tin whiskers is probably the biggest technical challenge that I've come across in the RoHS fallout, and again, I can see the economic interests at work creating a bigger market via replacement of defective electronics - at least the landfills and incinerators won't be dealing with as much hazardous substance while they process the stream of junk.