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>I wonder have you figured out before that why did your capacitor decided to
>become a resistor? I found the same thing in a customer return today.

It is quite a common failure mode with ceramic capacitors. They have a 
tendency to go into quite low resistance mode. There was an Australian 
manufacturer of low voltage disc capacitors which also had a tendency to 
become batteries, as the outer covering had a tendency to let moisture 
through. Any Aussies & Kiwis remember the Ducon (sp) Redcaps?

I remember when the 8086 micros first came out, I got to build a 
demonstration pcb that the NZ Intel reps got in (I was pretty friendly with 
the local salesman, and he didn't have time to build the kit). I started by 
fitting all the soldered in components, and then figured it would be wise to 
do a power on test before fitting the socketed chips, such as the micro, 
keyboard/display encoder etc. Luckily I did, as there was a short on the 5V 
rail. Also luckily I had available a DVM that was quite sensitive, and had a 
4 1/2 or 5 1/2 digit readout, so I went around measuring the voltage across 
all the 100n bypass capacitors. Sure enough across the pcb there was about 
10mV between the lowest and highest readings, so I clipped out cap with the 
lowest reading across it, and everything came to life. 


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