June 2005, Issue 179

Accurate Capacitance Meter
Cypress PSoC High Integration Challenge 2004 Contest Winner

TESTING AND RESULTS

We used an industrial capacitance meter (also DC) to measure a number of capacitors ranging from 1 to 800,000 µF. We used the results as a reference to evaluate the accuracy of our PSoC implementation. We also used standard bridge-based meters for capacitors below 1,000 µF.

Bridge circuits showed an error of 10% up to 35% with certain tantalum capacitors. In contrast, our PSoC implementation demonstrated, accurate results with less than 1% absolute error on average.