Why are the capacitors so big, while the transistors are tiny?
In: Technology
Capacitors run into physics limitations
If you need a certain amount of capacitance you can do the math and figure out the minimum volume that your capacitor could be. If it needs to be high voltage then the plates have to be further apart, and if you need high capacitance you need a lot of plate area, and if you want consistent performance you need a stable dielectric which is often not as good from a voltage or dielectric perspective so it makes your capacitor bigger.
There are a lot of applications where we want high value capacitors so we use large capacitors because that’s what we need
But we also have plenty of tiny tiny capacitors in computers. Every bit in RAM is a tiny capacitor that doesn’t need to be high capacity so we can make it quite tiny.
Transistors have a lot of performance characteristics improve as they get smaller, especially if you just want to run them fast and at low voltages like in CPUs.
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