Good, older MLCCs can be up to 3 or 4 percent Palladium by weight. Modern-ish ones can be zero, but are often maybe 0.1 percent.
It adds up. Remember, Palladium is *heavy*, ceramic is not. -- Will On Thu, Jan 24, 2019 at 11:29 AM Jon Elson via cctalk <cctalk@classiccmp.org> wrote: > > On 01/23/2019 08:20 PM, ED SHARPE via cctalk wrote: > > I learn something new then... when was palladium used? was it > > around in the 2100 hp days or was this used later? and I had not > > heard of it? > > > If palladium was used, it was in VANISHINGLY small > quantities. Many circuit boards use palladium to seed the > plating in the plated-through holes. But, the amounts there > are in the micrograms for a whole board. I suspect if > palladium was used in multilayer caps that it was used for > the same purpose, a wash over the surface of the capacitor > material, allow it to dry and then electroplate with the > desired electrode material. They'd probably use a couple > milligrams at most on each layer of a capacitor sheet, which > would eventually be cut up into hundreds of thousands of caps. > Some high-value MLCs can have 20 layers or so, so that would > be milligrams * 20 / 100,000. > Not a hell of a lot of palladium would be in an entire board > full of them. > > Jon