Electronic products are at the heart of almost all everyday activities that affect our lives. These products can be simple disposal aids that are only expected to last for the warranty period to critical safety devices that would be expected to last the life of the system and most certainly significantly longer than any manufacturers’ warranty period. Only the use of the highest possible quality controlled component manufacturing can only ensure such critical and long life electronic products to fulfil their needs. Young Electronics Group has over 35 years of dedicated experience stocking and distributing the highest reliability components from component manufacturers dedicated to zero defect manufacturing controls into the UK electronics manufacturing base. YEG supplies these high reliability components for use in aerospace, automotive safety and critical must operate control systems, medical, railways, defence and industrial process control systems and sub-assemblies.
One such electronic component that can cause major reliability problems in electronic circuits is the electrolytic capacitor. This device is not often seen as a weak point in circuit design but is has such a critical task to perform in almost all circuitry and will definitely be used within a system if a power supply or point of power transfer is required. Electrolytic capacitors are simple devices that many off shore companies can manufacture but only a few have the experience and control of the critical constituent
components that make zero defect high reliability capacitors. Nippon Chemi-Con is such a vertically integrated electrolytic capacitor manufacturer, based in Japan and with over 80 years of capacitor technology experience the company is totally dedicated to producing the highest quality and longest operating life components to the world’s most discerning electronic equipment manufacturers. From world beating chemistry for the various types of ionic salts and solvent carriers that make the liquid electrolytes to the best oxide layered aluminium foil for the capacitors’ electrodes and dielectric layers. The Nippon Chemi-Con factories from Japan, Indonesia, USA and China all have the identical ethos for zero defect controlled manufacturing, cleanliness, in-house designed capacitor manufacturing machinery and in-house design and manufacture of all the constituent components that make these world beating capacitors.
To further highlight the level of product integrity from Nippon Chemi-Con, YEG has stocked and supplied over 90 million of their electrolytic capacitors into the UK electronics manufacturing over the last 4 years with no known defect, product return or circuit failure. During the past 6 years YEG has shipped over 129 million pieces and experienced 6 returns for a manufacturing defect. This issue was due to some microscopic scratching within the aluminium can of a particular capacitor. Subsequently Nippon Chemi-Con stopped using sub-contracted aluminium can manufacture and brought the process into their own manufacturing facilities. Another statistical parameter that defines a world class manufacturing organisation is the drive to reduce the number of end of line failures, or for a process to achieve zero defects. Nippon Chemi-Con has year on year driven down the end of line defects. These reject levels have improved from 16 defect parts in 108 produced during the early 1990s to less than 40 defect parts in 109 produced by the end of 2011.
Looking at the expected operating life or field failures and MTBF of Nippon Chemi-Con electrolytic capacitors we can take a typical factory FIT figure for a particular series such as a KXJ radial can which is stated to be 38.2 FIT at +65C, now the latest edition of the MIL-HDBK-217C shows that an electrolytic capacitor is generally assigned a FIT figure of 100 X 2.08 = 208 FIT at +65C. Nippon Chem-Con is a significantly lower failure rate.
Nippon Chemi-Con’s strengths to continually produce these high reliability electrolytic capacitors are encompassed by the fully integrated manufacturing cycle. The etched aluminium foil, controlled layers of oxide dielectric and voltage forming are continuously being refined with the goal of ensuring the final effective capacitance area is increased. This process is a continually drive to down size the capacitors while increasing the capacitance or to maintain the capacitance values and ripple current rating in a smaller can size. The foil laboratories and manufacturing are in Nippon Chemi-Con Japan, 5 factories and Nippon Chemi-Con USA, 2 factories. The rubber sealing devices, aluminium cans for all sizes and type of capacitor body, the liquid electrolytes are all held within the company and add this to the in house designed and manufactured fully automatic core winding, foil stitching, electrolyte filling, can sealing and product testing machines make Nippon Chemi-Con one of the world’s few world class aluminium electrolytic capacitor manufacturers.
YEG Components is a specialist distributor of electronic components with over 35 years experience supporting global electronic product OEMs and CEMs. With 5 divisions each focusing on a specific discipline, YEG’s experienced support team offer design in and logistics support to their customers.
More information about the company can be found on their website at: www.youngelectronics.com
Or contact their sales team on 01494 753500