Effect of Moisture on AC Characteristics of Chip Polymer Tantalum Capacitors

Contrary to conventional tantalum capacitors with MnO2 cathodes, chip polymer tantalum capacitors (CPTCs) might degrade in both high humidity and dry environments. A better understanding of the kinetics of moisture content variations in CPTCs is necessary to determine bake-out conditions for the parts before soldering to avoid pop-corning failures and to select adequate preconditioning before reliability and qualification testing. In this paper, ac characteristics in different types of CPTCs have been studied with time during moisture sorption and desorption at temperatures from room to 125 °C. Capacitance increased with moisture content from minimal to maximal values reproducibly. This allowed using tantalum slugs as humidity sensors and measurements of capacitance variations with time to describe processes of moisture diffusion. A model that relates characteristic times of capacitance variations with the size of the case and moisture characteristics of polymer materials has been developed. Temperature dependencies of the characteristic times follow Arrhenius law with activation energy in the range from 0.4 to 0.5 eV. The equivalent series resistance (ESR) remained relatively stable during environmental testing, but dissipation factors (DFs), reached maximum and increased more than 10 times at characteristic times of moisture accumulation or release. The phenomena have been explained by changes in the charge absorption processes caused by variations of the barrier at the conductive polymer/Ta2O5 interface with moisture content.