PCB Corrosion

It happens very often that your electronic products fail to work. You may drop your phone in water, but it doesn’t necessarily stop working–at least not immediately. What people don’t know is that in most cases simply drying your phone out is not a solution because water ingress isn’t the real problem. It’s corrosion. Corrosion begins almost instantly when an electronic device gets wet, and is typically what causes devices to fail. 

But people always have no idea about why their electronic products are corroded when they didn’t drop phones in water before. So being able to identify the cause of corrosion on a printed circuit board assembly is critical which allow you to be able to both clean up the corrosion and prevent further issues from arising. There are numerous methods for you to take to find the culprit on your PCB and remove it. A scanning electron microscope (SEM) is recommended to identify the elemental composition of the corrosion. When you are able to identify the chemicals present in the corroded area and compare them to those that you expect to be present in the soldermask you can use process of elimination to find the offending elements. This will allow you to take the necessary corrective action to fix your circuit board.