Recently I had a problem with a pcb (printed circuit board) hardware;
it was supposed to draw nanoamps of current when in standby mode; but
was drawing current of the order of milliamps. There were about
20 chip capacitors, all connected to a common node; one of them
was leaking and caused this excess current; what i did was to take
a surface temperature measurement probe, connect it to fluke
multimeter and measure the temperature reading at each capacitor's
surface; i was lucky that one capacitor showed 29+ degree C while
all others read about 28 degrees. I replaced that cap with
high temperature and my problem was solved.
My question is: if the capacitor leakage were of the order of microamps,
the temperature effect will not be significant; is there a different
way to detect such small leakages ?