Everyone knows that the perfect capacitor to decouple the power rails around ICs is a 100 nF ceramic capacitor or equivalent, yet where does this ‘fact’ come from and is it even correct? These are the ...

As we have seen in part I and part II of this series [1], there are no inherent wear-out mechanisms in ceramic capacitors. And yes, as covered in part II, the high dielectric Class 2 capacitors (X7R) ...

Decoupling capacitors have long been an important aspect of maintaining a clean power source for integrated circuits, but with noise caused by rising clock frequencies, multiple power domains, and ...

[Bertho] really enjoyed pawing through the pile of projects submitted to the 7400 logic contest. But one thing kept hitting him with the vast majority of the entries: decoupling capacitors were ...

Deep-submicron systems-on-a-chip (SoCs) require a power-grid voltage drop of much less than 10% of VDD. Decoupling capacitors, or decaps, help achieve this goal by minimizing switching noise.

CMOS technology has evolved as the top choice for chip manufacturers. There are multiple reasons for its emergence to its current status, continuous reduction in feature size being one of them. SoC ...

The ubiquitous power-rail decoupling capacitor, located as close to its load as possible, has a thankless role and often gets little respect, as compared to the functions of high-performance analog ...

A capacitor rarely fails loudly. It fails quietly, and that’s what makes it dangerous. I remember debugging a compact PLC power board used in a packaging line. The system worked perfectly on the bench ...

With board-level operating frequencies exceeding the resonant frequencies of most MLCCs, parasitic inductances of capacitors are determining decoupling performance. The lower the equivalent series ...