Addressing performance differences in horizontal and vertical orientation mounting of multi-layer capacitors

An experimental analysis is presented spotlighting the performance differences of horizontal and vertical mounting of multilayer ceramic capacitors (MLCC) on a PCB in electronic design and simulation. The MLCC performance depends on the orientation of the electrode plates with reference to the ground plane. The measurement of capacitor vertically mounted eliminates the odd-numbered parallel resonances. To avoid the parallel resonance in the frequency band of interest, one should use vertical orientation over horizontal orientation of MLCC for a selected part value. Mounting orientation is often difficult to determine by the physical part dimensions for the capacitors with same width and height, but the performance difference identifies the orientation very clearly. This multilayer capacitor behavior is important to consider in electronic design, so orientation option is now offered as a feature in Modelithics Microwave Global Models(TM) for many capacitor families. Examples are presented to illustrate how the horizontal/vertical differences of the capacitor measurements are accurately addressed in these novel simulation models.