Evaluation of corrosion films on Cu and Ag reactive monitors deployed in data center server environments

Corrosion driven electronic hardware failures are a concern for data center and mission critical server applications. Increasing needs for ubiquitous computing has resulted in an explosive growth of data centers around the world. It has been observed that in emerging markets the contamination either from polluted air or through particulate matter gets inside the electronic systems impacting their long term reliability. The present work focuses on reactive monitoring of these environments using metallic coupons. Surface analysis of the corrosion films showed the presence of sulfide and chloride products for silver and predominantly oxides for copper. Not only did silver correlate well with locations susceptible to hardware corrosion failures they were less prone to polysiloxane contamination than copper and hence a better indicator of the corrosion risks.