UMD Theses and Dissertations

Permanent URI for this collectionhttp://hdl.handle.net/1903/3

New submissions to the thesis/dissertation collections are added automatically as they are received from the Graduate School. Currently, the Graduate School deposits all theses and dissertations from a given semester after the official graduation date. This means that there may be up to a 4 month delay in the appearance of a given thesis/dissertation in DRUM.

More information is available at Theses and Dissertations at University of Maryland Libraries.

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Author: search.filters.author.Panashchenko, LyudmylaSubject: search.filters.subject.Engineering, Packaging

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    Evaluation of Environmental Tests for Tin Whisker Assessment
    (2009) Panashchenko, Lyudmyla; Osterman, Michael D; Mechanical Engineering; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)
    Tin whiskers are electrically conductive crystalline structures of tin that over time may grow outward from tin-rich surfaces and present a reliability hazard to electronic systems. While the problem has been known for decades, no satisfactory explanation of whisker growth mechanisms exists, leaving the industry to create whisker-assessment tests based on empirical data gathered under various environmental storage conditions controlled for temperature, humidity and temperature cycling. The long-term predictability of these environmental storage tests has not been addressed and the accuracy of these tests in foreseeing whisker growth is unclear. In this thesis, different tin finishes are assessed for whisker growth in accordance with existing environmental test standards and compared to growth seen in ambient storage conditions. The results indicate that environmental tests may over-predict, under-predict, or show little distinguishable growth as compared to ambient-stored tin finishes. In conclusion, environmental tests are not a reliable method of assessing future whisker growth.