Well, being that most of my work during the last few years has been in aerospace we just use conventional lead-containing solder. When you can't afford for things to fall out of the sky you go with what you know works. We've known about tin whiskers since, I think, the 1940's. In fact, if I remember the history correctly, we added lead to solder precisely for this reason way back in the prehistoric era.
I might be diving into some industrial work soon that does not benefit from RoHS exemptions in this domain. This is one of the important cards in my kanban board...likely a rabbit hole that will not be pleasant to navigate.
I took a quick look myself. Here's a note from Maxim with interesting data:
I've used pretty much all the conformal coatings they list in this article. What they don't go into is buckling under the coating, which can short adjacent pins in fine pitch chips.
I truly hate this problem. I has wasted more of my time over the years than anything else. RoHS is, in my opinion, a very misguided directive. It's a perfect example of when politics gets ahead of reason and fear-mongering wins over science. If we are not careful we are on track to do something similar with climate change.
I might be diving into some industrial work soon that does not benefit from RoHS exemptions in this domain. This is one of the important cards in my kanban board...likely a rabbit hole that will not be pleasant to navigate.
I took a quick look myself. Here's a note from Maxim with interesting data:
https://www.maximintegrated.com/en/design/technical-document...
I've used pretty much all the conformal coatings they list in this article. What they don't go into is buckling under the coating, which can short adjacent pins in fine pitch chips.
I truly hate this problem. I has wasted more of my time over the years than anything else. RoHS is, in my opinion, a very misguided directive. It's a perfect example of when politics gets ahead of reason and fear-mongering wins over science. If we are not careful we are on track to do something similar with climate change.