AVX receives SMT’s 2005 Passives and Components Vision Award
AVX Corporation, a leading manufacturer of passive components, received a 2005 Vision Award from SMT magazine in the Passives and Components category for its innovative FLEXITERM™ Technology. SMT announced the recipients of the 2005 Vision Awards at an awards ceremony on February 8, 2006 in Anaheim, Calif.
“SMT Vision Awards serve as an industry benchmark of excellence for new technologies,” said Craig Hunter, AVX Strategic Marketing Manager. “When introducing FLEXITERM, we broke industry standards by allowing almost three times the amount of board flexure when compared to standard termination systems and further enhanced the capabilities of standard MLCCs. We are pleased that the FLEXITERM technology has been recognized by SMT as an industry benchmark with a 2005 Vision Award.”
FLEXITERM is a soft termination system that was developed as an additional flexible termination layer added to the component to ensure electrical integrity is maintained when external forces are applied. This new high-conductivity termination material was added to the AVX standard X7R dielectric ceramic capacitor to prevent failures in the system due to cracking.
AVX’s FLEXITERM offers up to of 5mm of flexure, without internal cracks, versus the industry standard of 2mm. In addition, FLEXITERM can achieve 3000 temperature cycles as compared to the industry standard of just 1000 cycles.
FLEXITERM is designed so capacitors will not crack under extreme environmental conditions however, in the rare scenario where a board may flex beyond 5mm, FLEXITERM is designed so a potential failure would be limited to the termination area and in open mode. With FLEXITERM, the open circuit occurs in a small area of the termination, resulting in little or no degradation to the capacitor’s performance.
