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by dragontamer 58 days ago
Look up parasitic inductance.

Through hole parts cap out at maybe low MHz. Many electrolytic caps frankly cannot effectively decouple signals above 100s of kHz even. Above that value, capacitors become inductors due to lead lengths, parasitic resistance, and other details.

To make capacitors work faster, we make them smaller and smaller. Surface Mount Caps are the only way to reach 20MHz++ decoupling speeds, and you need crazier tricks if you need additional decoupling beyond that frequency.

1 comments

Yes, but we are splitting hairs at that point. The transient spike is a high impedance voltage that is tripping the high impedance internal protection circuitry of the magnetometer. So whether we have 20mOhms of capacitive decoupling or 500mOhms of inductive decoupling, both are better than the infinite impedance of nothing there.

We're not building a precision filter, were cutting the paws off of a paper tiger. No need to let perfect be the enemy of good.

This is a circuit with a switching regulator that is, presumably, stabilized with something on the order of a 10uH inductor + 22uF capacitor.

So from my perspective, increasing the capacitance from 22uF on that output line to 22.1uF with a 100nF cap will likely do jack diddly shit.

It is far more likely that, ex, the author of this post screwed up the regulator design. Ex: did the author mistakenly think that more capacitance is better-er and stick a 100uF cap there, blowing out the phase margin of the feedback of the switching regulator?

Was the inductor properly sized? Not just inductance but also saturation current and internal resistance?