Phil Lessner's Blog
Tantalum Capacitor History Part 4: The Industry Today and Future Directions
This post is based on a presentation given at the Tantalum and Niobium International Study Center (T.I.C) 65th General Assembly in Tokyo, Japan, September 2024. In the last thirty years, mergers and acquisitions in the electronics industry have consolidated the number of Tantalum capacitor manufacturers. Miniaturization of consumer devices and higher power demands in the data center have guided the development of smaller, thinner, and more efficient devices. This final post looks at how the landscape of the industry has changed and how Tantalum capacitors are continuing to meet the challenges of the 21st century electronics industry.
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Tantalum Capacitor History Part 3: The Conductive Polymer Cathode
This post is based on a presentation given at the Tantalum and Niobium International Study Center (T.I.C) 65th General Assembly in Tokyo, Japan, September 2024. In the mid-1990s, new materials discovered 15 years earlier--conductive polymers--were applied as cathode materials in solid Tantalum capacitors. This led to a step change in performance which was needed to keep pace with the circuit performance of increasingly fast digital processors. This post covers how Tantalum-Polymer capacitors came into being and why they are the dominant form of tantalum capacitors today.
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Tantalum Capacitor History Part 2: Improving The Solid Tantalum Capacitor
This post is based on a presentation given at the Tantalum and Niobium International Study Center (T.I.C) 65th General Assembly in Tokyo, Japan, September 2024. This second part covers improvements to the solid Tantalum capacitor from the early 1960s to the late 1990s as electronic devices transitioned from the transistor age to the digital age and the market for these capacitors surpassed $1B.
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Tantalum Capacitor History Part 1: Invention of the Solid Tantalum Capacitor
This post is based on a presentation given at the Tantalum and Niobium International Study Center (T.I.C) 65th General Assembly in Tokyo, Japan, September 2024. This first part gives a gentle introduction to the working principles of the Tantalum capacitor and covers the invention of the solid Tantalum capacitor in the 1950s and its initial commercialization in the early 1960s.
More...Ultra-Thin Capacitors and CNF-MIM Technology
Philip Lessner, CTO at Yageo Group shares exclusive insights on Smoltek's breakthrough CNF-MIM technology for ultra-thin capacitors.
More...Phil Lessner on Electronics Trends
I was interviewed by Dennis Reed of Edgewater Research. Listen to hear about trends in the electronics industry and where YAGEO Group is headed.
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Powering AI in the Data Center
I concluded the first post in this series Artificial Intelligence-Why Now? with the observation that increasing computational power was one of the contributors to the current 'AI moment'. Those advances in computational power come at the cost of larger and growing power loads and energy use. The energy used by AI could become a limiting factor in the growth of this amazing technology. In this articles, I'll explore why AI uses so much energy and what is being done to rein in energy use.
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AI-Why Now?
AI can answer your questions, generate an image from a text description, and even make a video for you. The progress in the last couple of year seems amazing. It's almost magical what's happening. But, why now? The answer is the coming together of three threads:
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