On 01/19/2012 02:08 PM, Tony Duell wrote:
  I am not sure I understnd the point of the monitor
circuit. 
[...]
  If the capacitor fails open, or high ESR, or loses
capacitance, the
 ripple on that supply line will increase. A monitor could detect that,
 but equally if that happens, the machine stops working correctly 
.
The ripple can increase quite a bit before it causes failures. A
monitoring circuit can catch it before it gets that far.