Optimal Operating Voltage for Aluminum Capacitor with Different Electrolyte in SSDs
Kwan-Il Min, Yong Jung, Jae-Woong Choi, Byong-Sung Lee, Ha Choi Eun, Sung-Hoon Chun · 2025
Aluminum Capacitor (AC) have been an important component of the integral in the modern era of Solid State Drives (SSDs). Trend in market has shifted greatly to increasing the memory capacity of a single SSD, as for example, from 64 TB to 128 TB. With increase in memory capacity, the energy necessity required by the memory devices such as DRAM in a sudden power off situation has also increased greatly. Compensation to the energy increase can be provided by the storage capacitors such as Tantalum Capacitor or AC. Due to its advantage in cost and reliability, AC is chosen in many forms of SSDs. For this reason, AC makers have variety of line-up to suggest as their option. For the SSDs maker, correctively understanding the behavior of AC is critical in order to discover the right AC to use out of various choices out in the market. AC works as capacitor by contacted net area of liquid electrolyte and aluminum foil working as electrode. AC is widely known to be most vulnerable at high temperature environment due to liquid electrolyte evaporating under high heat, and oxide layer wear-out damage under high enough voltage. In this research, two type of ACs with different electrolyte are first compared under varied frequency. One AC has more viscous electrolyte than the second AC. Capacitance change behaviors are investigated with ACs, in two different environmental stresses of temperature and voltage bias. Based on the investigation with accelerated tests of ACs under temperature and voltage bias variation, a selected AC's corrective working voltage operation guideline in SSDs is suggested.