Pushing the boundaries with geothermal tool development can often necessitate exceeding manufacturer specifications for temperature and pressure of individual circuit components. Detailed here are the efforts surrounding geothermal temperature characterization of commercially available HT-Flash memory modules made by Texas Instruments (SM28VLT32-HT) and preliminary results of 3 commercial solid tantalum capacitors. Flash evaluation boards were modified for high temperature application and read, write and erase functionality were tracked as well as prolonged data retention at various temperatures well beyond datasheet specifications.

Tantalum capacitors can provide much higher capacitance at high-temperatures than the ceramic capacitors. This study evaluates selected tantalum capacitors at high temperatures to determine their suitability for you in geothermal field. This data set contains results of the first test where three different types of capacitors were evaluated at 260C.