Tantalum Capacitors - How to Fulfill the Steadily Increasing Reliability Demands of Automotive Applications

摘要

Tantalum chip capacitors are well known to be used in several applications (e.g. personal computers or mobile phones). Nevertheless - to use tantalum chip capacitors in automotive applications is due to the prevalent environmental conditions a steadily increasing challenge. To achieve the best quality level, several additional rules in design and assembly must be obeyed. These rules and improvements of the processes, like longer preforming time, vacuum tempering or leakage current measurement at elevated temperatures, lead to a satisfying reliability in rough environments and to a higher stability of the capacitors characteristics like leakage current, impedance, impedance loss or charge and discharge behaviour without any series resistor.