Steve,
There appears to be a plating line along the top edge of the termination
shown in the photo. Also there is no bath tub ring at the top of the fillet
common when PdAg termination is used. My vote is a Ni barrier part. Fillet
height is 1/4 the chip thickness or .5mm which ever is less so the fillet
may be OK but also check IPC-SM-785 because there is a statement about
fillet height and MLCCs. Less is best for these parts.

John Maxwell

At 09:48 AM 9/7/00 -0400, you wrote:
>Mornin' All!
>
>Well it's picture time again. We are running some boards this that uses a
>ceramic multi-layer capacitor from Nippon Chemi-Con. We've noticed that the
>fillets on these capacitors look different than what we've noticed before.
>See the picture at:
>
>http://www.driveway.com/share?sid=e25a88c4.8e904&name=Pictures
>
>You can see that the fillet seems to climb partially up the termination and
>then abruptly stop. The termination also has a sort of tarnished look to it.
>I went to Nippon Chemi-Con's web page and looked up the part, and they say
>the cap termination can be specified to be either silver or nickel barrier.
>
>I've always thought that most ceramic caps do have nickel barrier
>terminations, but then they would be finished with a tin/lead plating. Do you
>think that in this day of lead free (especially since Japan is really pushing
>for lead free electronics) that there's nothing but nickel on the
>terminations? And if that is the case, what would you think of this solder
>joint?
>
>Thanks!
>
>-Steve Gregory-

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