Measuring and Interpreting Impedance Data

With noted Power Integrity (PI) Expert Istvan Novak

Highlights the need for AC and DC bias testing for capacitors and the support Picotest has for testing and modeling capacitors using the Bode 100, new Bode 500 VNA, and other analyzers including the Copper Mountain, Keysight, and Rohde & Schwarz models.

Picotest provides Component Test Fixtures, Ground Isolators, Decoupling Board Test Kit (https://www.picotest.com/product/dtbk01-decoupling-test-board-kit/) and our popular Parts Kit for Power Integrity Training (https://www.picotest.com/product/pitk01-parts-kit-for-power-integrity-training/) in support of capacitor measurement.

Ceramic capacitors are extensively used both in PI for bypassing and in SI for DC blocking on high-speed channels. With shrinking capacitor sizes, the resulting loss of capacitance and loss changes of ceramic capacitors due to the applied DC and AC excitation are becoming more pronounced and we need multi-dimensional data to capture these effects.

This talk will describe the measurement setup and python automation that can automatically sweep along multiple parameters and allows us the parse and display the data along various axes. Actual measured data will be shown for both series DC blocking and parallel bypass topologies.