Electronic – Are additional smoothing capacitors required off of a voltage regulator

capacitorpic

This is a subset of a circuit I am building to run motors off a PIC 16F884:

schematic

simulate this circuit – Schematic created using CircuitLab

I noticed last night as I was drawing up my schematics that I might have redundancy in the use of the smoothing capacitors off of the VDD/VSS pairs on the PIC.

My question is: Does the 0.1uF cap off the 7805 have the same smoothing effect for both VDD/VSS pairs thus eliminating the need for the two extra caps off of the PIC?

schematic

simulate this circuit

Best Answer

Smoothing caps need to be as close to the power pins as possible of the target ICs. Trace parasitics add a whole bunch of invisible components in series with the power and return nets. It's a difficult concept to visualize from a schematic standpoint, since a schematic shows logical relationships (nets) but not physical relationships (how far apart parts are, how convoluted the routing is, etc.)

Unless your PCB layout is such that the regulator, capacitor and power pins are fractions of a millimeter apart, you'll need the local capacitors.

As a rule of thumb, it's always best to add decoupling everywhere you think you may need it on a layout - it's easy enough to not populate parts later, and much harder to add a cap where there isn't room for it.