Low ESR capacitors

I was reading the March 12 issue of EE Times and there was a good story from Richard Quinell on low-ESR capacitors. Boy, what a headache finding it online. EE Times has no place on the home page to help you track down an article so you can send it to all your friends. Typing "low ESR caps" as the jump page was titled, yielded an empty search. The solution, as always— a Google search that showed the article on Embedded.com so I could get the exact title and if I typed that into EE Times search engine it came up. Whew, am I the only one that uses Google as a spell checker, phrase finisher and quote finder? Well anyway, the money shot in the Quinnell article is a chart that shows all the companies and yeah, either by indifference or actual malice, the chart is a jpeg so you can’t store it or search it. Sigh. Old media. Matt Miller, our executive editor for the web, is so far ahead of all the other publications, boy am I happy I work here. The cover of the March 12 2007 issue of EE Times has one article about Microsoft crying they need more cheap programmers and another about some Java API for digital TV interaction. I am going to have to call Brian Fuller, their editor, and tease him that they are becoming Dr Dobbs Journal (Caution! Unsolicited video with audio from Micro, pig champions of the world). Fuller is a great guy and a very good editor so he will know it is just another analog jab at all these software weenies.

So where was I, oh yeah, the low ESR capacitor chart that is a graphic. It is really nice to have all the low ESR capacitor manufacturers in one place so I went down the chart and added all the manufacturers to my bookmark file. Unlike the sites listed in EE Times, I made sure these were the English sites and I drilled down to get the capacitor page, www.panasonic.com is not too useful. I also corrected the misspelling of Michicon. Once I got the companies bookmarked I added to the list other capacitor companies that I had already bookmarked along with a nice teaching site about caps, FaradNet. I put that site on top and listed the rest alphabetically. Then I went into all the properties page dialog box for all the companies and took out all the marketing blab so the page title is just the company name followed by the word capacitors. I took any “description” fields out. I saved this file as an Opera bookmark page here and as a nice html file here. Is not Opera the greatest web browser? And is not EDN’s website 10,000 times better than EE Times? We are the hard-core tech folks so that is what you should expect.

The other cool things I got from this issue of EE Times was the teeny tiny squiggle motor sitting on a penny and an ad with a picture of a pig with lipstick labeled C++ by this Java code outfit. (See what I meant calling them Dr. Dobbs (;^?)