Reliability Management of Tantalum Capacitors

Tantalum capacitors can achieve high reliability in steady state applications. Tantalum capacitors have highly stable capacitance and frequency dependent characteristics. Short circuits are a low level, but not negligible, failure mode. Because of this, reliability management of tantalum chips means the effective control of the S/C failure mode, not least because this mode cannot be designed around by use of redundancy circuits, etc.