If you’ve been building circuits for any length of time, you probably know you need decoupling capacitors to keep your circuits stable. But even though it’s a favorite technique of ours, just ...

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 ...

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.

Editor’s Note: In 2007, we published a four-part series on bypass capacitors and decoupling that was very popular with the design audience (links below). Now, one of the authors of Part 4, Kendall ...

Because of their high ESL compared to ceramic, tantalum capacitors are not the optimum choice for high frequency decoupling. Paralleling tantalum capacitors for bulk capacitance and ceramic for high ...