Hacker News Reader

Comment by IndrekR | Hacker News Reader

I wonder why new "we will all die to tin whiskers" articles stopped appearing 5 years ago. It used to be a really big thing, but now even all the new military projects are RoHS without any issues.

Did not get your link to Jim Williams article. Care to elaborate?

View on HN

A lot of it has to do with the platings on component leads/terminations. Within the last 10 years it's become clear just how well component manufacturers have dialed things in. They had to go pretty far to do that, though. I know the amounts used are miniscule, but it still amazes me that cheap commodity ICs have leadframes plated with palladium and gold, and dirt cheap resistors have ruthenium in them. (All very, very expensive noble metals!)

Jim Williams used to lick solder as he was soldering as did other old-timers. Another observed behavior was licking the thumb and wiping the joint immediately after soldering.

Later he developed Parkinson's disease (probably related [1]) and died of a stroke.

[1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/20807691

In my (limited) exposure of products failing in the field due to whiskers, the mitigations included coating the entire board in some kind of film, and changing layout to make the board less vulnerable in the first place. Probably designers just got good enough at that to the point where it doesn't matter

Conformal coating is not related to whiskers, it's to prevent condensation damage in certain applications. Used where it is called for regardless of solder type.

Some of the linked articles in this comment section claim that conformal coatings mitigate whisker shorting because the whiskers can't pierce the coating.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com