Tin or Zinc Whiskers

[Tom Henning]

There has been a PDF file circulating around here: and no, I cannot attach it here: that details some electrical failures caused by tiny tin and/or zinc whiskers forming in hardware, getting onto solder joints and causing a short circuits. The paper states this is usually caused when pure zinc and/or tin is used, up to and including just using zinc as a card cage material.

Rather then open up every single box I have around here for a visual inspection, does anyone have any suggestions as to where I could look or who I could ask to find out if HP has used anything made of these materials recently? I believe the oldest hardware I am currently using these days is a J282/2 purchased in 1998. Some of the hardware not in current use is a bit older, but since it's in storage just in case, I will not worry a lot about it just yet.

Another one of management's brillant ideas this is, to visually inspect everything. I'd rather not take down operating systems, but I'm just out of ideas where I could go in HP these days to ask this one.

[Torsten. · Accepted solution]

Go to www.hp.com and search for "Zinc Whiskers" or something similar. You will get a lot of documents.
I'm sure - no, I know it - HP is really aware of this and does not try to kill it's own systems.
;-))

[Tom Henning]

Oops. I thought I had done this /befire/ I posted to the forums, but I guess I had misspelled whiskers (again) when I did.

My bad. I know better, I try to find the answer myslef before bothering others. Sorry.