Re: strange cap

Jul 10, 2025 Last reply: 1 year ago 3 Replies


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> $27 each. I think I'll use film.

Nothing strange, just a relatively big stacked HIGH VOLTAGE and [relatively] HIGH CAPACITANCE (at least for such voltage rating) _C0G_ ceramic capacitor. The interesting thing is that it is sintered into a relatively small almost monolithic block that can be installed two ways. Earlier such stacked capacitors were made by soldering several separate caps to flat bus bar like leads with a high temperature solder. That was adding inductance and didn't allow the "Low Loss" mounting as it is shown in the datasheet for this one. They also were mostly thruhole parts, with several pins on those bus bar leads for soldering into TH pads.


No wonder it is THAT expensive -- it is not a jellybean part that cost a dollar per bucket and you put them all over left and right...


A comparable film capacitor will be bigger and will have significantly poorer ESL and ESR.

The data sheet doesn't say much about ESL and ESR - maximum values are listed on page five of the data sheet. They are clearly low, and the data sheet does spell out how the devices are structured to keep them low.

John Larkin doesn't seem to like getting his head around this kind of pesky detail.

ESL for sure. Ceramics and self-healing films can have considerable ESR too.

Of course I'd parallel a couple big leaded film caps with a few surface-mount ceramics.

I can get 1 uF at 1KV in a film cap for well under $2.

This is for a 750 volt into 50-ohm pulser with, optimistically, under

1 ns edges.

We could even use polymer electrolytics in series to get the voltage. We'd get lots of C. ESR and ESL are impressive on polymers.

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The ESL of a rolled film cap can be extraordinarily small, actually, like 8 nH for an inch-long specimen. That's less than half that of an inch of hookup wire (~20 nH), on account of the large outer diameter. It depends on the construction, I expect--if it has solid ends that directly connect with all metal layers, it just looks like a solid bar magnetically.

Stacked film is similar.

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

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