Simple capacitance meter, preferably analog?

That's how I do it here. Even has a graph running like an ECG. But it requires a li'l phase sensitive box I made myself, a USB sound interface like musicians use and a PC. Too much hassle for using inside a clean room and schlepping it all back and forth.

We used a more decadent method. Credit card, $389 and a shipping address. Of course now it's sold and if anyone else needs one I feel guilty.

That gets tough if the material is lossy and you need to reliably log capacitance changes of 0.1% or less.

I for one would be particularly interested to know how it performs in the lowest range (1pF FSD IIRC) if you have the time to check it.

It's going to be tough because it will be used in a very busy semiconductor plant inside a clean room, not by me. 2500 miles from here. It would almost be like asking an airline to check what happens if they toggle circuit breaker #83 while taxiing at O'Hare :-)

My 72Bs work great. They can measure a fraction of 1 pF at the end of a couple of feet of coax. The bias input lets us do semiconductor C-V graphs.

Using a display-after-zero-offset; not easy to read, though. Dynamic range of capacitance being a dozen orders of magnitude, is also a problem.

Bridge? ...though capacitors stable to .1% are tough to come by.

On mirrored meter you can but this one also has an analog output to which one can attach a 12-16 bit converter box such as Labjack.

So you can get the digital display you really wanted?

The 72C has arrived at the semiconductor plant and we just had an online conference. It works great and they hung a 10pF calibration capacitor to it. The meter promptly saluted by indicating precisely 10pF.

Thanks for the recommendation, John. We might even use the analog output because we must occasionally watch for very small changes at higher capacitances like 1000pF. Hard to do with a meter needle. However, a Labjack hooked to the Boonton meter's analog output should nicely do that job.

No, just a more accurate analog one, meaning with decent zoom features. On my homebrew system I am using a graph that rolls like an ECG plot. I can add offsets and zoom as much as I want.

But sine wave, tuned amp, phase-sensitive detector is what you just bought!

Yes. I thought you meant I should build it. Which is what I did when I built my own, twice (except the amp and detector is mostly software). I just didn't want to do that again and instead find a solution where all you need to do is call in a credit card number.