It just occurred to me while searching for various brands of capacitors and checking where they're made, that these components all come from more or less a single region of the world. Somewhere in China, Japan, Taiwan, or Korea, which are all fairly close together.

It got me wondering about supply vulnerabilities. I mean, suppose some country like North Korea or China started conquering their neighbors like Taiwan, SK, and Japan, and we ended up in a protracted war. Where would capacitors and small electronic components come from? Is there a backup plan?

It's not...

Re: annoying chinese cap companies

They don't just do this with caps, nor are only the Chinese guilty of this practice.

If you follow the fate of all the big American brand names in Electronics around the 1980s and 1990s, you'll see that most of them are now owned by some foreign company. Even the few that aren't foreign-owned just contract their work out to an overseas company and don't produce anything.

Generally speaking, if you see an old US brand suddenly resurface on any new product, chances are good that it's just a foreign company trying to...

Re: New Members - please post your introductions here

Hello, I'm a Computer Science student from Dallas. Currently attending Richland College, trying to get into UTD.

I'm on summer break, and I was somewhat bored. I started researching how computer power supplies and motherboards work, and the concept of a capacitor caught my interest.

I want to learn more about them, but I've never done any soldering before. I'm honestly afraid to try it myself because screwing it up could be expensive. Still, I've always admired the kind of things people who solder...