Tin Whiskers — Fact Or Fiction? 459
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?"
Does it matter? (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Does it matter? (Score:3, Insightful)
Built-in obsolescence (Score:5, Insightful)
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:obvious answer (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Built-in obsolescence (Score:4, Insightful)
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:lead free solder (Score:5, Insightful)
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 (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Tin Whiskers are fact (Score:1, Insightful)
angel'o'sphere
Re:Built-in obsolescence (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Tin Whiskers are fact (Score:5, Insightful)
As referenced in another comment, NASA Goddard Space Flight Center does indeed seem pretty concerned:
http://nepp.nasa.gov/WHISKER/ [nasa.gov]
How would we know? (Score:1, Insightful)
Ice spikes (Score:3, Insightful)
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 (Score:5, Insightful)
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 (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:I wouldn't go that far (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:Built-in obsolescence (Score:5, Insightful)
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:I wouldn't go that far (Score:5, Insightful)
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 [wikipedia.org].
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 [wikipedia.org] hasn't been published in a scientific journal for peer review.
Re:I wouldn't go that far (Score:5, Insightful)
And that's different than a commercial information source how?
Re:I wouldn't go that far (Score:4, Insightful)
Commercial sources don't say anyone can edit the entries.
Re:Built-in obsolescence (Score:3, Insightful)
Not holding the manufacturers responsible merely keeps the cost hidden, it doesn't get rid of it.
Re:Does it matter? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:I wouldn't go that far (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Is lead truly that dangerous ? (Score:3, Insightful)
But they buy components from somewhere... (Score:3, Insightful)
So even if they get to use leaded solder, they can get whiskers on their components...
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Does it matter? (Score:4, Insightful)
Please tell me I do not need sarcasm tags for this post.
Re:obvious answer (Score:2, Insightful)
No. lol
Wikipedia works well as one of the first sites to go to for information. But it is no Silver Bullet [wikipedia.org] 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 (Score:4, Insightful)
Wikipedia strives for those goals but at least you are not deluded into thinking they are there.
Re:More stupid laws thanks to paranoia. (Score:3, Insightful)
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. (Score:3, Insightful)
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 (Score:2, Insightful)
Wikipedia..nope you can't trust it... (Score:2, Insightful)
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 (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
The next big thing (Score:3, Insightful)
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 (Score:3, Insightful)
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... (Score:3, Insightful)
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.