Bypass capacitors

A bit of experimental research on bypass capacitors:

One finding:

For example, those 100 nF capacitors really ought to be placed within 10 mm of your chip if it’s operating at 100 MHz, but you can get away with even 10 cm if no signals go much above 1 MHz. A bulk 100 µF cap can be placed at 10 cm without much penalty in either case.

For us 20 kHz audio types, presumably it’s really not critical.

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so a 100nF anywhere in the locality of a TL07x will be fine :slight_smile: , more than fine.

good to know, but for the few pence they cost and the space they take, may as well just follow the rule of thum, put em in and do it as close to the chip as possible… Until someone proves it’s bonkers and causes an adverse effect.

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Let me quote one of the comments from that article:

The sharper the edge, the higher its harmonic content.
If you have digital chips in your circuit, especially ones with Schmitt trigger inputs, it doesn’t matter how slow your signals or their rise/fall times are, there will be high speed edges inside the chip, so make sure to keep your decoupling capacitors as close as possible.

Short traces/wires between the chip and the decoupling capacitor will also reduce the risk of emitting radio frequencies and causing interference to nearby circuits. Interference that would be especially annoying if it was in the audio range.

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