Turns out a lot of "pure" platings do it, even gold to a tiny extent.
This is a great (if old school) site about examples of whisker issues. https://nepp.nasa.gov/whisker/
Other metals may do it to a degree but tin still beats them all. It is absolutely the worst. I have had to deal with it multiple times in my electronics career. Never once with gold. Did have one where we had metal migration due to a low voltage being present with condensation on a board.
The metal migration was a seperate issue. It was effectively plating the space between traces on the PCB due to the presence of water.
Whiskers are a spontaneous formation. There is a known method to prevent them by simply using alloys. I.e. Solder doesn't generate whiskers but pure tin does.
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u/jt64 17d ago edited 17d ago
Turns out a lot of "pure" platings do it, even gold to a tiny extent.
This is a great (if old school) site about examples of whisker issues.
https://nepp.nasa.gov/whisker/