A board boots in a quiet lab and the engineer hears a faint buzz. Or a new product comes back because owners complain of a high-pitched whine. In both cases the source is usually the same: a multilayer ceramic capacitor sitting on a power rail. MLCC acoustic noise happens because barium titanate ceramic changes shape slightly [...]
Why server racks run 48 V while the room runs 800 V, what each choice costs in copper loss, and where the capacitors sit at every stage.
A GPU sitting idle draws a fraction of what it draws one clock later. On a Blackwell-class accelerator running at roughly 1000 W, the core rail sits near 0.85 to 0.9 V while the current swings across several hundred amperes as tensor cores spin up. The regulator cannot follow that edge. It is far from the [...]
Capacitor supply problems are rarely created by the purchasing team. They are created on the schematic, months or years before anyone needs a second source. A part that looks interchangeable on paper can still turn out to be impossible to replace. The reasons are mundane: a footprint only one factory builds, a tolerance window drawn at [...]
A purchase order for high-capacitance MLCCs placed this month may not ship until the second quarter of 2027. Constrained parts that used to arrive in six to eight weeks now quote at four months or longer, and allocation has become an ordinary word in distributor conversations. When the schedule slips, the question from the production floor [...]