Question posed by the Moderator to Carol Handwerker:
While whisker guidelines, standards and risk assessment tools exist, that can provide guidance for electronic packaging designers; care must be used when employing these. How close are we to a robust predictive reliability model for reliability estimation?

Dr. Handwerker responded: One of the issues is that we don’t really know how the whiskers nucleate, what the conditions are. Sometimes the films can sit there for years and there’s no nucleation, and then all of a sudden once they start growing they grow as fast as other films did when the whiskers nucleated right at the beginning. So in terms of a robust predictive liability model for when and how whiskers form, I think we have some conditions that we know pretty well that whiskers are going to form during those conditions. But for 99% of the conditions out there, I don’t think we really have a clue.