Failure Mechanism of Solid Tantalum Capacitors

Reliability of Solid Tantalum Capacitors

Reverse Bias Behavior of Surface Mount Solid Tantalum Capacitors

Solid tantalum capacitors are polarized devices designed to operate only under forward voltage bias conditions. Application of reverse voltage may produce high leakage currents with potentially destructive results. Such misapplications of these devices sometimes occur during bench testing, troubleshooting of engineering modules and/or during some malfunctions in operating systems. However, more...

Failure modes of tantalum capacitors made by different technologies

Generally, tantalum capacitor failure modes have been discussed both for the standard manganese dioxide cathode and the new conductive polymer (CP) type. For standard tantalum in the normal operation mode, an electrical breakdown can be stimulated by an increase of the electrical conductance in channel by an electrical pulse or voltage level. This leads to capacitor destruction followed by ther...

New I.R. Thermography methodology for failure analysis on tantalum capacitors

Tantalum capacitors are widely used on electronic systems due to their high capacitance value in a small size and due to their long storage capability. They are particularly attractive for aerospace applications. From failure analysis perspective, tantalum capacitors are challenging. Their typical failure mechanisms are characterized by a local increase of the leakage current in the manganese d...

Characterization of Tantalum Polymer Capacitors

Solid-electrolyte tantalum capacitors were first developed and commercially produced in the 1950s. They represented a quantum leap forward in miniaturization and reliability over existing wound-foil wet electrolytic capacitors. While the solid tantalum capacitor has dramatically improved electrical performance versus wet-electrolyte capacitors, especially at low temperatures, today’s electronic...