Why You Should Take a Look at KO-CAP If You Can’t Find Your MLCC

Everyone in the engineering community who has tried to order one of the higher value (≥ 0.1 µF) multi-layer ceramic chip capacitors (referred to by the industry as MLCCs) recently is painfully aware of the ongoing shortage of common values. Demand has outpaced supply, and it will take some time before MLCC production capacity regains parity. So what do you do in the meantime? Wilmer Companioni, Sr. Manager – Technical Marketing (and fellow engineer!) at KEMET may have a solution for you in the KO-CAP series (their tantalum polymer capacitor series). Will it work for everyone? No, but given the right situation, it may offer a reasonable alternative. Companioni outlines in a recent blog post in the Engineering Center, KEMET’s Online Education Resource, how, and under what circumstances, replacing MLCC with tantalum polymer might work for you.

Yes, the MLCC industry is experiencing quite the capacity crunch. The last time it was like this we were back in the .COM days of ’99-2000. Manufacturers are putting in capacity, but that will take some time to come up. I know that’s cold comfort for the engineers who are dealing with line down situations, and the supply chain managers who are having to beg, borrow, and steal parts. It is times like this that make engineers explore new options and alternative techniques without having to do a massive redesign.

I am not delusional, I was (am) an engineer too and selling me on tantalum when I’m looking for MLCCs isn’t exactly the way to my heart. But, as engineers, solving problems is what we do and that means doing things we haven’t previously considered. As with anything else in engineering, making the decision to go to KO-CAP from MLCC is just a matter of managing tradeoffs. There are a slew of things that must be considered when making that decision.

To learn more about going from MLCC to KO-CAP read the complete article here. Additionally, Robert Fay, Senior Applications Engineering Technician from DigiKey, provides thoughts on potentially crossing an MLCC Cap to a Tantalum Cap in his post on the DigiKey Tech Forum.