14 Feb
2010
14 Feb
'10
4:46 p.m.
Sorry Al,
I cant resist the war with you, and all caps (pun intended) in your email.
We design in a tant cap for the low ESR, and will continue to do so.
Have you seen the new low ESR ceramics, surface mount cap that looks like a 0806, but it
has multiple terminals along the long side?
Pop open a old CPU, they sit along side the chip.
You guys must have lotsa time on your hands, and tribal knowledge but no current
experience.
I wrote about the cap problems in old equipment because they were real in the day, and yes
wrong decade.
Nicolet did much better in their plotters. I installed a bunch of them, NASA, shuttle and
station design teams. I always liked the Nicolet products.
Randy Dawson
KF7CJW
Extra
Date: Sun, 14 Feb 2010 11:28:13 -0800
From: aek at bitsavers.org
To:
Subject: Re: Getting to dislike tantalum caps
On 2/14/10 10:45 AM, Randy Dawson wrote:
_________________________________________________________________
Hotmail: Free, trusted and rich email service.
http://clk.atdmt.com/GBL/go/201469228/direct/01/
Dwight,
There was some criminal stuff going on with electrolytes in this era
This has absolutely NOTHING to due with the problems he is seeing, nor is
it even from the right DECADE.
Solid Tantalum capacitors have the failure mode he is observing, they short.
Many electronics companies banned their engineers from designing them in for
this exact reason. When they short, they BURN UP, often taking large chunks of the
circuit board with them.