On Friday, June 19, 2015 at 4:04:09 AM UTC-4, Arfa Daily wrote:


I don't think that they *do* have to be un-polarised, as such, given the
ones that Phil has found. I think it's just because they *are*, if you see
what I mean.

That's correct. They are not polarized because that's the technology. Electrolytics are generally polarized because that's the tradeoff in the technology at the time. You can always use a non polarized cap in place of a polarized.


To be honest, I never knew that you could get multilayer
ceramics in such high values.

The first time I ran across these caps was about 10 years ago in LCD TVs on the tcon board. Six to ten paralleled in a bypass on the main dc-dc convertor to give several hundred uf of capacitance. Take up no room at all. Not as short happy as tants but they short more than typical electrolytics.

Because of time constraints
with ordering-in those ceramics, I think I'm just going to go with a pair of
small tants, fitted to observe their polarity.

If they fit and you can keep the leads short, no problem.