Acoustic Microscopy of Ceramic Capacitors

The acoustic microscope has been shown to be a powerful new tool for characterizing nondestructively the internal structure of multilayer ceramic capacitors. Delamination resolution has been shown to be greater than is available with other current techniques. This tool is sensitive to erratic electrode stacking, ceramic margins, termination quality, and other defects. As such, it is already useful in production monitoring, failure analysis, and research with perhaps new capabilities still to be discovered.