What is monolithic capacitor and what are its advantages and disadvantages?

Multi-layer ceramic capacitors, also known as monolithic capacitors, are widely used in electronic precision instruments. Various small electronic devices are used for resonance, coupling, filtering, and bypassing.

The basic structure of a simple parallel plate capacitor consists of an insulating intermediate dielectric layer plus two conductive metal electrodes. The structure of the multilayer chip ceramic capacitor mainly includes three major parts: a ceramic dielectric, a metal internal electrode, and a metal external electrode. The multi-layer chip ceramic capacitor is a multi-layered structure, which is simply a parallel body of a plurality of simple parallel plate capacitors.

As the basic component of the electronics industry, monolithic capacitors are used more and more widely. They are widely used in various military and civilian electronics and electronic equipment, and various small electronic devices are used for resonance, coupling, filtering, and bypassing. Such as computers, telephones, program-controlled switches, sophisticated test equipment, radar communications. In many electronic products or power circuits are indispensable.

It has large capacity, stability, small size, high temperature and humidity resistance, low temperature drift coefficient, and good high frequency characteristics. Monolithic capacitors can not only replace mica and paper capacitors, but also replace some tantalum capacitors. The disadvantage of monolithic capacitors is that the temperature coefficient is very low, which is higher than the price of ceramic capacitors.