Getting to dislike tantalum caps

Hi As much as I don't like tantalums ( and I've seen a few burned boards in my time ), electrolytic have another nasty problem. Most designs use them for bypass caps. These tend to be way over designed so that even an old dry one or two make little difference. The problem happens when they get to the point that there just isn't enough capacitance left in them that they no long provide the function they we there for. If it is a power supply filter, it is usually easy to find but bad bypass caps often cause intermittent failures that are really had to find. It is also true about the electrolytic caps with the bad electrolyte formula. These didn't just gracefully die. They would dump their electrolyte on the board and electro-strip ( made up word ) the traces from the board. Really nasty. It was a chemical company that was selling bad electrolyte to various cap manufactures. Even some of the ones listed here as the only ones they'd use. I know because we manufactures computers with these bad ones and we had a list of which run numbers were bad from each manufacture. By the way, some were japanese but most were made in Taiwan not ROC. So, as much as I don't like caps, unless they start distributing 3 phase to peoples houses, we're stuck with capacitors, unlike the Cray that used no filters caps. Dwight _________________________________________________________________ Hotmail: Trusted email with powerful SPAM protection. http://clk.atdmt.com/GBL/go/201469227/direct/01/