EEVblog #1037 - Solving Ceramic Capacitor Cracking

Dave demonstrates various practical PCB and component selection solutions and techniques to prevent flex stress cracking of Multi Layer Ceramic Capacitors (MLCC) on PCB's and preventing your product from catching on fire!
Open Mode capacitors.
Flexible Endcap Soft Termination Capacitors
Lead Frame Capacitors
Series Capacitors

TDK Solutions for Ceramic Capacitor Cracking

Soft Termination:

AVX Flexiterm:

Kemet Flex Termination

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[BrunoPOWEEER]

One of the most informative Electronics Engineering videos so far, this is gold info mate!!! =]

[janijoeli]

This was amazingly fascinating!! Probably explains a lot of "I dropped it and it just stopped working" type of failures in modern electronics containing SMDs. Thanks for going through the trouble of doing so much research, and giving us the summary in a format of a well made youtube video. :)

[subigirlawd_]

I've learned more in this 28 minute video then a year in school..thanks Dave..

[KillerSpud]

I've been working as a component engineer for a couple years now, so while I have seen this kind of stuff out there, it is nice for someone to put it all together. Interesting stuff.

[TheHuesSciTech]

Excellent video! But at 24:18 the Open mode caps are the cheapest, not the most expensive. The 3 stars mean "excellent from a costing perspective", not "a lot of cost".

[Catoblepa]

Hi Dave, IC Test Development Engineer here.
Probably the best video in the latest months, you clearly have lots of experience on PCB design and sharing it is very interesting and formative!

[PeregrineBF]

I remember several fellow EE & Comp E students complaining about having to take a basic mechanical engineering class. This video is a good example of one (out of many) reasons such classes are actually quite useful.

[flymypg]

Splendid having all these hints, tips and tricks in one place!

When putting boards through shake&bake testing and HALT, at one employer we often did a final test on our "sound stage", where we attached linear coil audio-band actuators to each mounting post, and activated them in combinations to induce all mounted vibration modes while monitoring for performance deviations due to MLC failures. Found so many issues for one product that we built a sound stage into the final production board test station, so boards were sound tested before any other tests.

We used MLCs because of their otherwise great environmental ratings, especially radiation hardness and vacuum tolerance. They're amazing little wonders!

[nBoxes]

If only professors would teach with half of the enthusiasm and knowledge as Dave here I'd go back to school tomorrow.

[johnbellas]

Wow I never really realized or thought that these small SMD caps were so fragile in cracking like they are !!!  and the many ways that you can design board layout to reduce the chance of a failure, as well as specify chips designed differently to avoid cracking failure !!! Real INTERESTING, THANKS DAVE

[sandrucristian]

I can't believe it, this is exactly the explanation we are looking for, now I know why the capacitors are failing, I just took out a capacitor that shortened my motherboard from my laptop

[Aerospace]

I'm a PCB Design Engineer in the automotive industry. Whenever MLCC's are on any circuit that's connected directly to battery, the capacitors must be in series. Also, the two caps have to be 90 degrees to each other. This is done with the thought that the board will typically only flex along one plane. Most auto companies don't seem to use those Megacaps very often because they're too expensive.

[georgebitsworth]

I think your best videos are the instructional ones. This certainly was one of those. Just a note, this started out as a failure (the magic smoke) but it led to a great learning exercise.

[irgski]

Good video! As mentioned, this is learned in the school of “hard knocks” and (rarely) in any Uni.
Had a memory card that was randomly causing the memory chips to “loose it”. Root caused it to microcracks in the mlcc decoupling caps.

[Sembazuru]

Back when I used to do component level repair on cell phones, our quick and dirty check for cracked ceramics was to touch the end-cap of the cap with our soldering iron. If the cap was cracked then the end of the cap will stay stuck to the soldering iron (due to surface tension of molten solder).

[Pi-Tutorials]

Stress = load / area, i.e. pressure. The correct term to use is probably Strain, which is change in length / original length.

Nice video, thanks.

[Daveyk]

Excellent video/article. In my repair of the instruments I work on, shorted ceramic caps have been an issue, especially if a drop is suspect. In the old days of through hole, shorted ceramics was as rare as Jen’s teeth (although I’ve seen two in ~36 years of service). In surface mount, shorted ceramics seems rather common.

Watch some of those iPhone repair videos (Jessup at iPad Rehab), and shorted ceramics in iPhone 6+ phones seem the most common failure. I fear dropping my phone now even surrounded with a genuine Outter Box case.

[truesoldier]

Awesome information. Not very often someone would run across this kind of issue and know why. Thanks for going into detail, very informative!

[lbek]

This finally explains the isolation slots around big mlcc caps that I see on some lcd panel controllers, tnx Dave!

[photium]

Thank You so much for this video. I recently made a electronics project, but it ended up having a dead short. I took off the SMD ceramic capacitor, and it works great!