Hi Gordon! Take a look at Dr. Tench's chapter in the Mechanics of Solder Alloy Wetting and Spreading book that I mentioned before - it has much more detail than I can/should mention here. Tin oxide isn't like nickel oxide or aluminum oxide - thermodynamically both SnO and SnO2 can form at room temperature and will grow! The SnO grow first to an X thickness depending on the solder composition, structure, and surface conditions. At some point the Sn has to diffuse a long way to combine with O in the air thus a layer of SnO2 forms. The SnO2 is the more stable oxide form and typically only forms a thin layer on top of the SnO. I don't doubt that ellipsometry will give you great oxide data but we don't often have a mirror-like surface to work with. Much of the early oxide testing only mentions the formation of SnO but note many of these studies used either Auger or xray photoelectron spectroscopy methods which cannot see the difference in the SnO versus SnO2 energy peaks because they overlap. That is why the electrochemistry techniques (e.g. SERA testing) work well in identification of what oxide type is present - the oxide reduction potentials in certain buffer solutions allow for the identification of the oxide species very easily. Water vapor also influences the oxide growth but at room temperature the thermodynamics favor unhydrated oxide growth. That is why steam aging (at 93 C) has been shown to form a different oxide than natural aging - thus some of the cause for the steam aging correlation problems. The Solderability task groups now view (as demonstrated by their specification implementation) steam aging as one method of demonstrating the durability of a tin/lead surface and not some storage time equivalence figure of merit. Putting a board in a freezer is not going to stop the surface oxides from growing - that's why I mentioned my trying some SERA testing to see just how much and what type of oxides show up. I have documentation that nitrogen storage of pwbs DOES reduce the surface oxide grow but keep in mind the original thickness of the solder coating and the presence of intermetallics can often make the use of nitrogen storage appear meaningless due to their influence on solderability. Nitrogen storage can be beneficial depending on how you run your manufacturing process. You may not realize this but Northrup has a SERA tester in Rolling Meadows could be of use to you. Give me a call and we can discuss oxides in depth off-line. Dave Hillman Rockwell Collins [log in to unmask] ______________________________ Reply Separator _________________________________ Subject: Freezing electroless tin: oxide, IMC, whiskers, and pest Author: [log in to unmask] at ccmgw1 Date: 1/20/97 6:52 PM Hi, Dave! I was interested to read about the studies you and Dr. Tench have done on tin oxide, and hope to be able to read more after I can get my hands on the publications you cited, but don't keep me in suspense - I'd still like to know whether my initial statement that tin oxide grows a very thin protective coating that essentially then stops growing is right or wrong. The thicknesses cited by Klein Wassink are 1.5 nm (nanometers) immediately, 2 nm after a week, 3 nm after a year, and 6 nm after 20 years. Even in boiling water the thickness after 4 hours is only 4.5 nm. Using as a rule of thumb three atoms per nm, that means that the oxide layer on any given tin surface that hasn't been heated is 5 to 15 atomic layers. At such dimensions, it is a little difficult to distinguish between a surface layer of SnO2 and of SnO with chemisorbed oxygen. If your studies have shown that the native oxide on tin or solder at room temperature is much thicker than this, and that it continues to grow, could you please provide some numbers? A simple citation of thickness vs. time would be sufficient to allow comparison with what I've quoted. Also, do you have data for the role of water vapor at room temperature on the oxide growth rate? Incidentally, let me mention that a great way to study oxidation of tin and solder would be by ellipsometry - a technique very familiar to people who measure oxides on silicon for device fabrication. Ellipso- metry uses elliptically polarized light and measures changes in the angle of polarization of the reflected light. It does require a mirror-smooth surface (irregularities smaller than the wavelength of the light being used), but it is able to detect sub-monolayer cover- age, and to distinguish types of oxide. I don't understand why putting something in a freezer to slow down a reaction rate should sound strange. Actually, what seems strange to me is to continue to put things in dry nitrogen without getting solid evidence that that helps. Surely the cost of all that nitrogen and the storage containers must be substantial. (It also seems strange to me to do vacuum baking as if the vacuum could somehow suck water molecules out of solids, but maybe that's getting too far afield.) Your comment about using SERA to study what happens in a freezer has me concerned that you may be confusing two different things. My com- ments about the benefits of the freezer had to do not with the rate of oxide growth (remember, I claimed that the oxide doesn't grow measur- ably even at room temperature and hence that there is no benefit to storage in dry nitrogen), but the rate of reaction between tin and copper. I don't see how you could use SERA to study that. If you are talking about the freezer retarding the conversion of SnO to SnO2, then there is no doubt that it will, just because reducing temperature reduces reaction rates in general. There are two other issues that need to be considered here: 1) tin whiskers and 2) tin pest. 1. Based on what I've read, I'd have to conclude that immersion tin could develop whiskers, but need not. My thanks to Yisrael Leshman for passing along information via TechNet on a new immersion tin that, reportedly, does not form whiskers and does preserve solderability for longer than people have usually experienced. There is another ques- tion to be dealt with, though, and that is, what happens if tin whis- kers do form on a printed board that then gets soldered? Certainly if the entire assembly is heated above 232 C (tin's melting temperature), the whiskers will all melt (to form tin balls?), and there will be no residual stresses to drive further whisker formation, so how much concern is justified? (Incidentally, in order for a wave- or hand- soldered through-hole assembly to develop a complete fillet of the type that people expect, the destination side of the board must rise at least above 183 C (solder won't wet to a surface that is below its melting temperature), and practically, it must get substantially hotter than that, so if whiskers were even a theoretical risk, it wouldn't take much of a process adjustment to ensure that it got above 232 C.) 2. My thanks to Joseph Haimovich for raising the issue of tin pest as a potential problem of putting a tin-plated board in the freezer. Tin pest is the conversion from a metallic crystal structure of tin (white) to a nonmetallic, powdery form (gray). According again to Klein Wassink (p.148, 2d edition), "the transformation may occur after a long incubation period at temperatures below 13 C, the rate of transformation being highest at approximately -30 C." I don't know what the term "long incubation period" means, and I don't know if anyone has data on tin pest forming with electroless tin on copper. If someone were interested, it obviously wouldn't cost very much to find out, although it would take a while, and of course, the most that anyone could say would be, "It didn't happen during my investigation." They wouldn't be able to say, "It never occurs" (and this applies as well to studies of whisker formation). If it did occur, it seems certain that that would spell the end of any protection of solderabil- ity which the tin would provide. Gordon Davy *************************************************************************** * TechNet mail list is provided as a service by IPC using SmartList v3.05 * *************************************************************************** * To unsubscribe from this list at any time, send a message to: * * [log in to unmask] with <subject: unsubscribe> and no text. * *************************************************************************** * If you are having a problem with the IPC TechNet forum please contact * * Dmitriy Sklyar at 847-509-9700 ext. 311 or email at [log in to unmask] * *************************************************************************** *************************************************************************** * TechNet mail list is provided as a service by IPC using SmartList v3.05 * *************************************************************************** * To unsubscribe from this list at any time, send a message to: * * [log in to unmask] with <subject: unsubscribe> and no text. * *************************************************************************** * If you are having a problem with the IPC TechNet forum please contact * * Dmitriy Sklyar at 847-509-9700 ext. 311 or email at [log in to unmask] * ***************************************************************************