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Friday, 24 February 2012

Why do we have capacitors at IC supply pins

In analog/digital circuit, we always see capacitors being connected from supply pins to circuit ground, but why?



From my perspective, the two primary reasons for those caps are:

Reason #1:
Connection from supply to IC has impedance - those caps (placed near the IC) will supply most of fast current demand which gives less voltage fluctuation on supply pin when supply current flows


Reason #2:
The supplies  are not ideal, regardless of them being a battery or switch mode supply, there is always internal impedance/resistance, and those capacitors will make sure the IC "see" low impedance supplies across the frequency of its bandwidth (remember that capacitor impedance drops as frequency increase)

1 comment:

  1. Nice blog… Thanks for sharing very useful information about electrical circuits.
    Learn Electronic Circuits

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