[tejohnso]

This is very surprising to me. I had no idea that certain conductors had some kind of (stochastic, according to robomartin) built-in time delayed short circuit mechanism that will, without question, manifest itself given enough time.

Like some kind of natural electronics prank.

[voakbasda]

If you were feeling particularly cynical, you might wonder whether this phenomenon has been incorporated into shipping products, such manufacturers would be assured that their goods would fail shortly after the warranty expired.

[robomartin]

> assured that their goods would fail shortly after the warranty expired

I have seen a number of similar comments on this thread. Manufacturers were dragged kicking and screaming --they were forced, through legislation-- to switch to lead-free solder. Nobody --nobody-- in manufacturing wanted this. This idea that going lead-free was a conspiracy by manufacturers to have their products fail more often is completely false.

One of the most well-known episodes of mass failures due to tin whiskers happened when the Swatch Group (watch manufacturer) converted to lead-free solder. They had so many failures that they ended-up requesting an exception from RoHS [0].

As I said in another comment. The problem with RoHS as it pertains to tin whisker failures is that we will likely never know what percentage of failing consumer, commercial and industrial products end-up in the landfill because of the forced and premature transition to this lead-free solder. If one studies that history of the transition it is easy to see it includes many companies clamoring for years of additional studies before making the change. We went into it by force in 2006 without having had full data on potential issues.

At the time I was manufacturing expensive FPGA-based real time image processing boards. I made the decision to stop shipping product to Europe.

My decision was based on a very simple reality: I still had to honor a years-long warranty in Europe and could not include any clause stating that we could not be responsible for a government-mandated technology known to have serious problems that could lead to failures at any time, even very early on. Companies were forced through mandate and given absolutely no immunity from the very real tin whisker problem. I did not ship a product into Europe for two or three years. We were busy enough everywhere else, so I did not care one bit. We actually had European customers who needed the hardware buy through a US-based path and then hand carry into the EU through whatever means. Not my problem.

[0] https://hlinstruments.com/RoHS_articles/A-1018_Swatch.pdf