Cer vs tant caps

Tantalum may have improved lately, but they used to have a bad rep for failing in exothermic fashion.

Not much reason to use them for what we do, ceramic goes 100+ uF for surprisingly cheap.

Ceramic is difficult to beat where low ESR/ESL or high ripple-current tolerance is required. For bypass/decoupling (like on the FET drivers) ceramic X7R/X5R is good. For low-value precision work ceramic C0G/NP0 is the way to go.

Nice table at the end of this PDF:

http://www.kemet.com/Lists/TechnicalArticles/Attachments/93/2008-11%20Update%20-%20Ceramic%20versus%20Tantalum.pdf