mubs
Storage? I am Storage!
Like we already didn't have enough to worry about. Read more at The Inquirer.
Floating zinc whiskers strike at PC systems
- Thread starter mubs
- Start date
jtr1962
Storage? I am Storage!
This shouldn't cause that much of a problem since most circuit boards made these days are coated in electrically resistant lacquer. There is a chance a whisker may lodge between two pins of an IC, but even this can be made a non-issue by coating the board(and all parts on it) with lacquer after the parts have been placed. This will also make it more resistant to both humidity and corrosion. Anyway, since the whiskers are at most a few mm long, they can only short adjacent pins of an IC. Most ICs don't have the power and ground pins next to each other anyway, so shorting adjacent pins possibly may force an input or output to a different state. This might crash the server, but will not damage it permanently. As a more extreme example of how robust most electronics are, I've done quite a bit of soldering on live electronics* with very few disasters, even when I accidentally short adjacent pins. Of course, once in a great while a touch something I'm not supposed to, and I get the infamous puff of blue smoke.
*I sometimes do this while breadboarding projects and testing different component values. Generally, I'm only touching inputs or low-power IC outputs. I DO NOT touch power transistors or MOSFETS with a soldering iron while the circuit is live unless I'm looking to make some fireworks.
*I sometimes do this while breadboarding projects and testing different component values. Generally, I'm only touching inputs or low-power IC outputs. I DO NOT touch power transistors or MOSFETS with a soldering iron while the circuit is live unless I'm looking to make some fireworks.