Electronic – Availability of 0.01 pF and 1 pF chip capacitor with SRF more than 15 GHz

antennacapacitorhigh frequencymlccRF

I am working on a parasitic steerable phased array antenna, designed at 15 GHz. I need to terminate one of the array elements with a 0.01 pF chip capacitor to achieve desired steering direction. I have explored a lot, but sadly I could not find a 0.01 pF chip capacitor available in the hardware with any vendor. The least I could find was 0.05 pF manufactured by AVX RF. Does anyone know of any vendor who manufactures 0.01 pF chip capacitor having self resonant frequency (SRF) more than 15 GHz?
Also, I need another chip capacitor of 1 pF with SRF more than 15 GHz. 1 pF capacitors are easily available but the SRF is far below 15 GHz and hence cannot be used in my design.
Any suggestion or solution to deal with this issue would be highly welcomed.

Best Answer

You are talking about so small capacitances that you don't need any discretes to achieve them. According to [1] the capacitance of an 1206-size components pad is about 0.72 pF. Therefore there is no point in creating discrete capacitors smaller than about 10 pF because it is easier to embed them into the PCB and you get smaller parasitics too [2].

The second reference I used talks about some fancy dedicated PCB materials for embedded capacitors, but you can also use regular FR4 PCBs. Howevere, you are most probably going to need impedance control. Calculators and equations for PCB embedded capacitors are readily available by googling i.e. http://chemandy.com/calculators/rectangular-capacitor-calculator.htm.

[1] http://www.sigcon.com/Pubs/edn/parasiticpads.htm

[2] https://multimedia.3m.com/mws/media/251029O/fabrication-of-embedded-capacitance-printed-circuit-boards.pdf