Small glass capacitors polarized?

drlegendre . drlegendre at gmail.com
Sun Sep 27 13:26:20 CDT 2015


I'm not sure what you're describing. Can you link to a pic of one of these
caps?

But in general, nothing lower than 1.0uF in value is likely to be
polarized, and any polarized cap will need to have a polarity marking for
at least one of the leads. Smallest polar cap I've ever seen was a 0.47uF
electrolytic.

You'll sometimes find a dot or band on a small non-polar cap, but that
typically indicates the 'outer' foil of the cap so that it can be installed
in the most efficient orientation (outer foil to ground, in an RF bypass,
etc).

On Sun, Sep 27, 2015 at 1:03 PM, Noel Chiappa <jnc at mercury.lcs.mit.edu>
wrote:

> Hey, everyone: those little glass capacitors (well, the casing is glass -
> I'm
> not sure what's inside) that one often sees used as per-chip noise/spike
> supression caps (often 0.01 uF or some such size) on 1970s/1980s vintage
> boards: are those things polarized, or can I put them in either way around?
>
> I tried looking online, but didn't get an answer I was fully acomfortable
> with
> (some of the 'glass capacitor' listings I found seemed to apply to a
> different
> kinda 'glass capacitor').
>
> As always, thanks in advance for any help!
>
>         Noel
>


More information about the cctech mailing list