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Tin Whiskers and the coming Electro Armageddon

Sounds like a death metal band right? Unfortunately for all of us, its not - instead, its referring to a phenomenon know as “tin whiskers” in which soldered joints in electronics grow minuscule metal stalactites that eventually even short out the device in question, or explode and physically disable it. Tin, if you didn’t know, is the primary material used to solder the wiring joins in your computer, car, iPod, phone, etc. Without lead being mixed in with the tin solder, whiskers abound.

At the core of the issue is the industry-wide switch to lead-free solder, ostensibly for health reasons. Lead, as Robert Cringley explains, is the only way to stop tin whiskers, and do-good “green” legislators have done away with it.

As commenter D. McCorvey points out on Robert’s post…

The only way to prevent tin whiskers reliably is to add lead to solder and use no tin anywhere else in electronic assemblies. Even the ‘lead free’ solders such as tin-silver-copper have been shown to grow whiskers over time.

So, a few months ago, my 2 year old Casio Exilim started falling apart. It lost the ability to read/write SD cards, then the CCD crapped out such that all it could show was a varicolored blur. Is this unwarranted, mysterious failure a result of tin whiskers? I don’t really know, but I question any legislation that guarantees a limited lifetime, followed by interminable landfill decomposition, for electronics. As Cringley’s post title notes, “sometimes going hurts more than it helps.”

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