Murata's 4mm and 8mm Reel Standards

Murata Electronics produces a lot of MLCC capacitors, which have traditionally come on 8mm width paper-based tape & reel packaging for automated assembly. However, in recent days an industry push for more efficient materials usage has resulted in 4mm width embossed taping becoming more popular. How can you tell which size taping your capacitors are going to come on?

Generally, 0402 or smaller capacitors are by preference being shipped on the 4mm embossed reeling, due to the waste problems with shipping these extremely small parts on 8mm paper tape. The paper reel can also sometimes contribute to solder defects in the mounting of extremely small components due to solder contamination from paper fluff and dust. As such, Murata and a number of other manufacturers are leaning away from paper reels for these devices and using embossed plastic instead. This reduces material wastage and contributes to cleaner, less error-prone assembly.

This new embossed reeling is called out with the ‘L’ suffix in Murata MLCC part numbers such as GRM022R61A103KE19L. If your assembly equipment isn’t set up to work with 4mm taping yet, you can search for the older 8mm paper standard reels by substituting a ‘D’, ‘E’, or ‘W’ suffix for the ‘L’ at the end of the part number, as per Murata’s catalog.

For more information, check out these Murata resources:
Murata: New Packaging Methods
Murata: MLCC General Catalog (Page 5 in particular)