Tin whisker failure. M Dranfield 2011 Television-Magazine-Forum.co.

.uk The consumer electronics industry is heading for melt down , its already started and there is seemingly nothing we can do about it , I am of course referring to Tin Whiskers Never herd of them ? you soon will do as they are causing havoc in electronic equipment , tin whiskers are not new , they have been around since the 1940s and were known as dendritic growth,microscopic tiny hairs that erupt in all directions from tin based materials such as solder, back in the 1950 s a physicist discovered that mixing small amounts of lead with solder cured the dendritic growth and it no longer posed a problem.Tin whiskers typically measure 5 microns in diameter and have a sharp pointed tip that given time can puncture any surface ,a single whisker could carry up to 30 milliamps of current and heat seems to accelerate there growth ,so why after so many years has the problem suddenly cropped up again. The answer to that is simple, since 2006 under the (RoHS) directive ,Reduction Of Hazardous Substance the use of lead in solder has been banned in consumer electronics, interestingly enough though, military and medical applications are exempt from this legalisation, so while they have a zero failure rate the poor old consumer has to put up with substandard equipment which will invariably have a very short life. Anyone who services sky digital boxes will know the reputation the ZIF tuner has acquired for intermittent signal faults in pace manufactured boxes , the cause is the 48 pin QPSK chip MAX2104CCM on the tuner and the symptoms are typical of tin whisker growth inside the chip itself, however the growth inside the chip seems to have been caused by a chemical that was added to the chips plastic moulding as a flame retardant, the problem is every single chip made will eventually fail, in fact I never sell a pace digibox without first replacing this chip regardless of whether its faulty or not , in later production chips the chemical was removed to cure the problem, however with the removal of lead in solder from 2006 we could well be heading for a major disaster , now while I dont profess to be a chemist and the failure mechanism is complex and far beyond the realms of this magazine I have observed the following simple points which you might like to bare in mind. . Tin whisker growth seems to be accelerated by heat, the hotter a chip runs the quicker it will fail. Tin whisker growth causes virtually untraceable intermittent faults, equipment may run for a week without problem then suddenly drop into ST/BY, it can then come back on its own and perhaps run for hours on end before the fault shows up again, in some cases the sheer intermittency can make the equipment un economical to repair, it may even give the impression you are looking for a dry joint. Tin whiskers can be destroyed by heating the suspect chip up to solder melting point , in the case of BGA packaged chips reflowing the chip itself can cure a fault leading you to believe it had a dry joint ,however this is only a short term cure , the whiskers will grow again and the chip will fail again, the more functions a chip carries out the more different fault symptoms will be displayed. Lastly, heres food for thought, the painter chip in Phillips TVs can cause no end of different fault symptoms , and someone in a past issue of Television magazine

reported reflowing the pins with solder cured the problem and he thought it was a dry joint, I havent had one of these sets in for ages but I wouldnt mind betting heating up the entire chip will cure the fault for a while.

Michael Dranfield. DigifixLtd.