Hi Joerg,

"Joerg" wrote in message
...
People were bidding on those caps like in a Texas style auction until the
last one was gone and whole production lines came to a grinding halt.

Scary... I wasn't around for that particular problem, but I do remember in the
mid-'90s when it seemed that tantulum capacitors had pretty much all dried up
and gone away. That seemed to be what spurred the ceramics guys to do some
research, development new products, and really "buy back" a lot of the market.
(Well, that and probably some of your clients who took your advice to never
use tantulums in the first place so they instead placed multi-million part
orders for ceramics. :-) )

It might be there to compensate for the input capacitance at FB. Just ask
them via email.

Will do.

I suppose this isn't a mass product.

No, initial quantities are going to be in the hundreds and I even hitting
10,000 if things were wildly successful is pretty unlikely.

Given how many different single-sourced switcher controllers the folks at
Linear, National, Maxim, TI and others have, *someone* has got to be buying
those LTC3404's (and others) in the hundreds of thousands.

Do you really need 90% efficiency here?

If I'm reasonably objective about it, no, 80% would probably be OK; I'll just
wince a little.

---Joel