EP#141: It Depends – An In Depth Look at MLCCs with James Lewis

James Lewis Our guest this week may or may not be an Engineer or may or may not have Hair! James Lewis’ passion for teaching non-engineers has led to him to create the Bald Engineer Blog and the AddOhms video tutorial series With 15 years of experience in electronics, marketing, sales, and teaching James boils seemingly difficult concepts down to the core, so that anyone can learn what they need to finish that next great project Worked at Agilent as an FAE for oscilloscopes (for about 10 years), then as an FAE and marketing at KEMET for about 7 years Now working as oscilloscope product manager at Rohde and Schwarz MLCC - Multi - Layer Ceramic Capacitors Where did all the MLCCs go? Looking back, it was obvious we were headed towards a shortage but companies didn’t see it coming What are they? Common uses? 4 ways Ceramics lose capacitance Temperature Tolerance DC Bias Aging effect What to consider when choosing an alternative dielectric/technology for capacitors Questions from the Slack Channel Insights into selecting bootstrap caps for high-frequency, high-voltage H-bridges What footprint should we be designing with, going forward? Presumably different sizes for decoupling vs bulk on the power inputs for getting different ESRs? Is MLCC cracking due to pcb flex something that still gets seen in 0402 and below? General rules of thumb on choosing appropriate packages based upon desired voltage rating and capacitance? What *is* the fundamental physical mechanism behind this voltage-dependent capacitance drop? KEMET Ask an FAE on Ceramic DC Bias Why does the Y5V dielectric exist? Notes SL0 ceramic capacitor dielectrics SMT Soldering Guide for Capacitors Yoga Poses May be Good For You, But not Your Ceramic Capacitors Murata Article on Aging

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