New conductive polymer chip capacitors for demanding automotive applications

AVX has introduced the robust new TCQ Series automotive conductive polymer chip capacitors. Qualified to the Automotive Electronics Council's AEC-Q200 specification for passive components, the TCQ Series meets the AEC's challenging 125C lifetime stability test and humidity bias testing at 85C and 85% relative humidity for up to 1,000 hours. "The AEC-Q200 lifetime stability and humidity bias tests are notoriously difficult for polymer capacitors to pass due to inherent material limitations. As such, we based our new TCQ Series automotive conductive polymer chip capacitors on our proven, high reliability TCR Series professional conductive polymer chip capacitors, making several critical improvements to the material, design, and manufacturing processes in order to deliver the enhanced endurance and high stability, harsh environment performance required to achieve AEC-Q200 qualification," said Gordon Hoey, global automotive product marketing manager, AVX. TCQ Series automotive conductive polymer chip capacitors feature conductive polymer electrodes, which enable a benign failure mode under recommended use conditions, and exhibit basic reliability of 1% per 1,000 hours at 85C and rated voltage with 60% confidence. The series also delivers low DC leakage (0.1CV), high capacitance, and stable electrical performance at operating temperatures as high as 125C in small, low profile case sizes, which makes them ideal solutions for a wide variety of space-constrained, harsh environment automotive, industrial, telecommunications, and DC-DC converter applications. Lead-free compatible and RoHS compliant, the new TCQ Series automotive conductive polymer chip capacitors are currently available in three case sizes: 1210 (EIA Metric 3528-21), 2917 (EIA Metric 7343-31) and 2917 (EIA Metric 7343-20). The full voltage range for the series spans 4V to 35V, and capacitance values span 4.7µF to 220µF with a ±20% capacitance tolerance. TCQ Series capacitors are also 3x reflow compatible at 260C, and are rated for operating temperatures ranging from -55C to +125C.