AVX Expands Inter-Digitated Capacitors, Includes RoHS-Compliant Versions

AVX Corp., has expanded its inter-digitated capacitor (IDC (News - Alert)) product line to include ultra-miniature, RoHS-compliant versions.

The IDC Series offers low ESL values of 35pH in a small footprint. Company officials said that this product line is ideal for advanced decoupling applications such as CPU, GPU, ASIC and ASSP.

Since the low ESL IDCs reduces the number of capacitors required versus standard MLCCs, they free up valuable board space, according to company officials. Also, IDCs reduce in the number of capacitors required in a design, which lowers placement costs.

Company officials said that the key physical characteristic to determining the equivalent series inductance (ESL) of a capacitor is the size of the current loop it creates. And the smaller the current loop, the lower is the ESL.

Decreasing the distance between terminations to minimize the current loop size, IDC also

reduces inductance by creating adjacent opposing current loops, said company officials.

 “ESL of a single capacitor or an array of capacitors in parallel determines the response time of a power delivery network (PDN),” said Tim Piver of AVX (News - Alert), adding that the lower the ESL of a PDN, the faster the response time.

“A designer can use many standard MLCCs in parallel to reduce ESL or a single low ESL inter-digitated capacitor device,” Piver said.

The IDC Series features a footprint of 1.6mm x 0.80mm, and is available in Pb-free and SN/Pb terminations for military applications.

AVX is an international supplier of electronic passive components and interconnect solutions with 24 manufacturing and customer support facilities in 15 countries around the world. The company offers a broad range of devices including capacitors, resistors, filters, timing and circuit protection devices and connectors.

Earlier this year in March, the company introduced a multilayer capacitor (MLC) chip with new dielectric and internal electrode materials in 0603 case size.