alt Hacker NewsAs a noob to chip design, I've always wondered; why can't chip packages integrate filter caps at the outputs directly? Instead of having boards put a ton of them on the PCB as close to the chip connections as possible?
Is it a matter of current handling? Or repairability (easier to replace one external smoked cap than a whole IC...)?
(I know the filtering here is a little different in purpose, but it just made me wonder).
Replies
kens • today at 9:20 PM
On-chip decoupling capacitors do get used [1]. The main problem is that they take up a lot of valuable die space for not much capacitance.
Some can (see modern CPUs which have a huge chunk of them integrated into the package). It's likely to be quite expensive for most packaging processes and realistically for a lot of them there isn't really enough space. (on older style DIP packages there might be enough space for some of the modern smaller caps but the caps available at the time would not fit).
With on-die capacitance you can't realistically get enough capacitance for decoupling in the right frequency range (though it is still relevant: in practice decoupling is a case of multiple overlapping filters, from the response of the regulator itself, to any bulk capacitance, to local decoupling capacitors on the PCB, to the plane capacitance of the PCB itself, to the capacitance of the power distribution inside the IC. Each of these stages has a lower inductance but also a correspondingly lower capacitance and so deals with a higher-frequency part of the load).