All solid capacitors ???

Gigabyte is making a big deal about their motherboards having "all solid capacitors".

Is this some new type of capacitor technology, or are they saying that they don't use electrolytic (paper?) capacitors?

Reply to
Some Guy
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Newish technology.

They're electrolytics still though, just a wholly different type but with much longer working life too.

The problem in standard electrolytics is the liquid electrolyte which eventually dries up.

Graham

Reply to
Eeyore

They're presumably referring to solid-electrolyte capacitors. Rather than using a electrolyte, these use a solid material, such as manganese dioxide or an organic semiconductor (e.g. Vishay's OS-CON).

This would presumably result in a longer useful lifetime (MTBF) for the motherboards. Boards of this sort would be immune to the bad-electrolytic-capacitor plague which caused premature failure of numerous consumer-electronics devices a few years ago (a stolen, incomplete, and thus unstable liquid electrolyte formula caused many 'lytics to gas, swell, and leak their guts out).

Even electrolytics made with a proper liquid electrolyte do have a limited lifetime, especially at high temperatures - the electrolyte slowly loses water vapor through the case and seals. Solid- electrolyte caps would not have this failure mechanism, although I imagine that they could turn out to have other (perhaps novel) ways of dying after a few years.

Tantalum-bead caps are an older form of solid cap, and were (and still are, I think) used extensively in applications needing a lot of bypass capacitance in a small space, with good high-temperature performance. Some of them are notorious for developing internal short circuits after a couple of decades... apparently the tantalum can grow "whiskers" which short out the electrodes. This is perhaps the commonest failure mechanism for (e.g.) Tektronix 4xx-series oscilloscopes and some Wavetek RF gear... a tantalum cap shorts out internally and pulls down one of the DC supply rails. If enough current is available from the supply, the shorted cap can go BANG in an impressive fashion.

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Dave Platt                                    AE6EO
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Reply to
Dave Platt

Some Guy skrev:

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This might explain it.

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Hilsen Mikkel Lund
"Sund fornuft, har aldrig stoppet en tosse"
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Reply to
Mikkel Lund

Uhh, isn't a tantalum capacitor also solid? (Except, of course, for the old ones filled with sulphuric acid.)

Al

Reply to
Al

Al skrev: > Uhh, isn't a tantalum capacitor also solid? (Except, of course, for the

Yes, but the thing about these capacitors is that they do not contain acid as the normal electrolytic capacitors.

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Hilsen Mikkel Lund
"Sund fornuft, har aldrig stoppet en tosse"
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Reply to
Mikkel Lund

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