Lifespan of a quality solid state amplifier?

Did you know on average caffeine has an 8 hour half life in your body?

Rok2id, Half life can refer to radioactive material, but radioactive material is not the only thing measured in half life.

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Here is another concern. My company has been dealing with this for several years now. The caps in the computers that run our equipment are failing at a very high rate.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capacitor_plague

I agree that MTBF is not applicable when talking about caps. It applies to complex equipment that needs to be repaired and put back into service. The time it takes a cap to fail is simply lifetime. Failing caps may lead to a lower MTBF for whatever they are installed in though.

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I might be halfway through my life and I feel radioactive sometimes so it's "win win".

English is an evolving language.

'Half life' works really well in this case since you have the statistical issues of a single cap and also that of several.

In the case of a single cap its half life is 20 years on average. IOW, you will find that it may well have dropped to half its capacity, with its ESR likely more than doubled. I have never seen caps over 40 years old that are safe to operate; but by that time they should be replaced, without question.

In the case of a bank of filter caps it will be found that in 20 years time half of them have reached the end of their useful service life, by leakage, by shorting, or simply so ineffective that the equipment using it no longer meets spec.

It seems that 'half life' works very well for this. However if sensibilities are offended (we're not in Alice's Wonderland, apparently) then MTBF is fine.

Herman, A few years ago I heard about a Chinese firm doing some corporate espionage. Apparently Panasonic had developed a more effective dielectric for their electrolytic caps. Fearing the discovery of their formula by competitors, they kept it in 2 halves in different locations. How I heard it was that the Chinese company had managed to get one of those halves and used it in their caps, which got used in a lot of computer boards that began failing about 6-8 years ago on this account. Is this anything like what your firm was experiencing?