6th International Symposium on Tin Whiskers Henry Ford College, Loughborough University, UK 27 and 28 November 2012

摘要

At the end of November 2012, Loughborough University's Henry Ford College was host to the 6th International Symposium on Tin Whiskers. The Symposium was opened with a welcome by Dr Geoff Wilcox from Loughborough University and he began by welcoming Mike Osterman from CALCE, Maryland. Geoff gave an overview of Loughborough University, which had been around in various forms for over 100 years. The symposium had been organised by the university's department of materials which currently had around 80 PhD students. Mike Osterman then gave the formal symposium opening remarks. He highlighted how the move to lead-free assembly had generated new interest and concerns about tin whiskers. He also outlined the work being undertaken within CALCE as part of their broader interests in electronics reliability. Mike highlighted how the RoHS Directive was evolving to include new categories of equipment that would have to be lead-free and how there were major concerns about tin whiskers across a wide range of industrial sectors. He then gave an introduction to tin whiskers and how they caused problems via their conductivity and the number of failure mechanisms that were possible. There were a large number of factors influencing whisker growth.