test smd capacitors for current flow

[jeswanth123]

Dear Al members and senior engineers,

I have soldered few smd ceramic capacitor on my board (0603), And i though of testing them by using a multimeter. Unfortunately the multimeter cant check the capacitance and so i turned the wheel to buzzer sound positing. And i went on checking the leads of all the capacitors, on some of them it gave a sound, so I was satisfied that they are fine and soldered correctly. On some it didnt sound. I checked the solder its perfectly fine. I am sure the ends are connected.

Is there way to check the ends of smd capacitors with any device like the dc tester etc. I wanted to know if there is a current flow in them.

Thanks a lot and replies are highly appreciated.

 

[tgootee]

If you don't suspect the capacitors, themselves, but only want to verify the solder joints, you could put one probe on the metal at the top of the end of a cap and the other probe on the other side of the solder joint on the same end of the cap, so you were only measuring the resistance of the solder joint itself.

You can't check the capacitors, themselves, with a multimeter. Therefore, you can't check solder joints AND a capacitor with a multimeter.

You COULD try using an oscilloscope and a pulse generator. But that is usually only used to check the ESR (equivalent series resistance) of electrolytic caps, since they do go bad with age, developing high ESR. But it might also work to find high-resistance or open solder joints with SMD caps. Take a look at **broken link removed**, for an idea of how to set it up. It provides a way to see small differences in resistance. Once you know what the display should look like, for a "good" case, then a bad one should be significantly different and immediately obvious, especially if you adjust the scope's vertical scale for high sensitivity.

Such a tester can be "fooled" by parallel components, when testing components in-circuit. But if you keep the pulse amplitude below 0.25 volts (I used 0.1 V), at least it won't turn on any semiconductor P-N junctions.