Ever since I began designing circuits, I’ve read about bypass capacitor usage.

Engineers make broad statements about what you obviously have to do. Disagreeing with this advice automatically makes you a neophyte.

Common phraseology of bypass capacitor lore includes:
– You must use a mixture of low and high value capacitors to filter low and high frequency transients.
– You must use a tantalum bulk capacitor
– Sprinkling 1uF or 100nF caps around a board is stupid
and I’ve not made this one up:
– If you don’t know how to properly design capacitor bypassing, you should not be an EE.
[Of course, by “proper” they mean follow their advice]

I’ve been told by other reputable sources that since good MLCC [multi-layer ceramic capacitors] of high value and good electrolyte are now available, that most of these rules are exaggerated as yet another way for some engineers to claim superiority over others.

I decided to perform a few simple measurements to help me figure out for myself what I need to do when designing a circuit with bypass capacitors. Feel free to post below and offer advice as to how I’m wrong and/or what I should do with my graphs.

Test setup:
I have a simple “DG8SAQ” Vector Network Analyzer that I bought from SDR-Kits. It’s a reasonably good value and covers the range of 1kHz to 1.3 GHz. Without any fancy impedance converters, I decided that using this 50-ohm system to measure capacitor impedance would not be an unreasonable analog to what is happening when a capacitor is used for bypassing.

Bypassing for high speed digital systems is demanding. Edge slew rates can easily reach into the GHz range for FPGA designs. Even common LVCMOS digital logic can be extremely demanding – a recent comparator I used (MAX962) will drive it’s output high/low in 2.3ns (specified at 5v. It will be somewhat slower at 3.3V)

What I decided to do is solder a couple SMA connectors adjacent to each other, as in the following picture:

I calibrated VNA and soldered a few surface mount capacitors into the open space. I used the following values:
1 nF
10 nF
100 nF
1 uF

From basic theory we know that the impedance of a capacitor is, as written in Laplace domain:
1/(sC)

Where
s = j*W [complex frequency]
and
C = capacitance value in Farads

In reality, capacitors have ESR and ESL. ESR is equivalent series resistance, and ESL is equivalent series inductance.
Alternating current by definition makes the impedance of a capacitor change.

My measurement system is not perfect for at least one reason; the ESR of a capacitor is usually << 1 ohm. My VNA is a 50 ohm system. I cannot effectively measure the ESR with this system. These plots will reflect the ESL, which I can measure.

Firstly I measured a 1nF capacitor. This plot is the magnitude of the signal that goes through the capacitor. This is called “S21”
I measured from 10kHz to 100 MHz because this seems to be a range most people would be interested in:

[click image for larger version]
Next I tested a 10nF capacitor of the same size and type:

Looks pretty nice to me.

Now for the 100nF cap:

I continued on with a 1uF capacitor. The plot is quite boring:

If you’ll notice: these last two plots went all the way up to 300 MHz. I thought there must be something interesting going on at some point. Not really.

My conclusions are based on the measurements that I’ve done. Obviously I have not included PCB parasitics in my test setup.
My conclusion is that for point-of-load bypass capacitors, the actual value of the capacitor makes little difference. I would not hesitate to use 100nF MLC-capacitors all over my PCB. Ideally the capacitors are placed as close to the power pins of the integrated circuits as possible, in order to make the current loops as small as possible.

Bypassing requirements for real circuits are very complicated. If you just have a fundamental sine wave current, you just pick one capacitor and be done with it.

I believe what I’ve shown is that the Fourier components of your load current that exceed about 1 MHz are easily handled by 100nF MLC capacitors, and that your lower frequency bypassing can be handled by a bulk capacitor that is located elsewhere on the board. Of course this depends on the inductance of your PCB traces.

Your system probably has intermittent loads switching on and off, or perhaps you’re building a switching power supply. The best bypassing setup would be an ideal capacitor of arbitrarily large capacitance value. This would theoretically cover your Fourier components from a few Hertz up to hundreds of MHz. Recently I’ve been using MLCC as large as 100uF with the X5R rated dielectric (never use Y5V!) I believe these new enormous MLCC are nearly ideal capacitors. They are expensive but I highly recommend them, especially if your alternative is a tantalum capacitor.