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Joined 4 months ago
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Cake day: July 10th, 2024

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  • You got a degree in semi conductor physics? Lol

    Man, that “lol” really annoys me and comes accross condescending. If you’ve got no arguments, there is no need for an academic dick measuring contest. You can just leave it. To answer your question:
    In parts, yes. Not my specialisation though, but enough to be able to distinguish electromigration from whiskering.

    being pedantic. Engineers will call all these things whiskers.

    Being pedantic is part of the job of an engineer. I’m an engineer working in research. I don’t call electromigration “metal whiskering” or vice versa.
    Besides, as I’ve mentioned, it wouldn’t even be pedantic to distinguish them that way as the differences are not miniscule. They are formed differently and look differently.

    I’m not saying the photo in the thumbnail is an example of electromigration.

    Yes, to the post which is titled “TIL computers can sometimes grow crystals” you said:

    This can happen inside ICs […] It’s called electromigration.

    Which is still wrong. We can observe electromigration in ICs, or in metallic conductors in general, but this is a different phenomenon than whiskering, which can look like those crystals while conductors affected by electromigration form voids and protrusions out of material build-ups which usually can’t even be seen by the bare eye.
    But maybe that was a misleading expression and you didn’t mean to equate those two.


  • If you understand “car” as “hardware degradation” there is something to it, despite calling it “electromigration”.

    You said it (= whiskers) can be simulated and that it’s called electromigration. From what I understood, this statement is wrong, since they are both different in both cause and effect. Metal whiskering can be simulated to a certain extent, yes. But that’s vastly different to what electromigration is and how it works.