Digital circuits work with 0’s and 1’s, right?

Well, yes, but that doesn’t mean the analog voltages and currents are necessarily very “clean”. To fabricate a somewhat extreme example, I connected a JeeNode without regulator and without 10 µF capacitor to a 3x AA battery pack, and made it run this simple loop:

Sleep for 3 seconds, then send an SPI command to the RFM12B wireless module. Note that the RFM12B is not set to receive or transmit mode – the ATmega just sends it 2 bytes over SPI.

Let’s look at the variation in voltage and the current consumption (this shows the benefit of an MSO, BTW):

The ATmega wakes up, sends four 16-bit commands over SPI (the compressed timeline is a bit misleading) and powers off again. The whole process takes less than 200 µs. The four SPI transfers are: wake up the RFM12B, send it the 0xFE00 soft reset, and then two more to send the RFM12B back to sleep. You can even see the ≈ 0.6 mA baseline increase while the RFM12B is awake and idling. The SPI bus runs at 1 MHz in this example i.s.o. 2 MHz, because the ATmega is running off its 8 MHz internal RC oscillator, but the sketch was compiled for 16 MHz.

The current spikes are not so important. It’s normal for switching signals to consume relatively much energy (that’s why turning off the clock saves so much power). The problem here, is that these current fluctuations have such a large impact on the supply voltage – one of the spikes causes the supply to briefly drop more than 0.25V!

This is why “decoupling” capacitors are used around digital chips, even a lowly ATmega consuming just a few milliamps (it’s running at 8 MHz here, BTW). There is a 0.1 µF cap on the JeeNode board, but it’s not enough.

Here’s the same circuit, with both signals in close up:

Nasty stuff. I’m not 100% convinced that the real waveforms look exactly like this (the scope and probe might be distorting it a bit), but there’s no question that each SPI pin change has a substantial impact on the supply rail.

Here’s the same, with a 0.1 µF capacitor added near the battery pack:

And with a 470 µF electrolytic cap (both showing just the scope’s measurement results):

Note that the 0.1 µF cap has much more effect, relatively, than the 470 µF one. It’s better for HF noise reduction.

Does it matter? Yes, probably. Although all these setups work fine, the variation in voltage is fairly large, and could cause problems when operating at lower voltage levels, nearer the specified limits. Also, such currents might generate a fair bit of Electromagnetic Interference (EMI).

By adding more capacitors very near to the power consumers, i.e. the ATmega and RFM12B, this can be reduced. Such decoupling capacitors will act like little charge buffers, helping the supply cope with such sudden changes.

There’s much more to it than that (there always is). At switching frequencies of 1 MHz and above, the impedance of a wire starts to matter a lot. In fact, it’s amazing that digital circuits work at all – even without any HF design!

I’ll investigate further, but for now just remember: when in doubt, add caps … everywhere.