Bruno Ferreira Contributor Bruno Ferreira is a contributing writer for Tom's Hardware. He has decades of experience with PC hardware and assorted sundries, alongside a career as a developer. He's obsessed with detail and has a tendency to ramble on the topics he loves. When not doing that, he's usually playing games, or at live music shows and festivals.
chaz_music It seems someone did an AI search on ceramic capacitor failure modes. A large part of my engineering work is to troubleshoot failures and I have never heard of the term pyroelectric failure before, although there is a piezoelectric effect that ceramics can have that makes them "sing". I even just did a search on the cap reliability sites and got no hits for that. If this is a true term, I would be interested in a source to research myself. Ceramic caps usually fail and get hot when cracked, which is usually caused by poor manufacturing. During assembly, the PCB and parts are to be preheated correctly before going through the IR oven process. Doing this step wrong leaves the parts with high mechanical stress across the part body after cool down, which slowly cracks the brittle passive parts. Ceramic caps are very brittle, so over time, ceramic caps start to break, creating internal low resistance shunt paths. And then they get hot. The larger the part, the more likely they will crack due to thermal stress. So the larger caps will break first. This is such a common and huge problem that some cap manufacturers have developed cap terminals that have "soft" structures to alleviate the mechanical stress. The PCB association IPC gives very good guidance on making sure this does not happen. Reply
ezst036 This video was extremely fascinating. Reply
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