To complement what spec mentions, if you do use ceramic caps, employ exclusively class-I ceramics (NPO, COG).
Stay away
from class-II ceramics. (X7R, Y5V)
Hi ST,
Yes, good point about ceramic capacitors. Just to add a bit more:
Ceramic capacitors have two overriding advantages: very low effective serial resistance (ESR) and good high frequency performance.
But, a big problem with ceramic capacitors is that their capacitance varies with temperature and, more bizarrely, with voltage. Apart from the variation with voltage, which causes distortion, they also generate other distortion; for example, in audio amplifiers, they give an odd 'brittle', 'grainy' sound
Class I ceramic capacitors are much more stable than class II, but the problem is that class I ceramic capacitors are relatively expensive, relatively large, and are not available is high capacitance vales (only about 100nF maximum).
On the other hand, Class II ceramic capacitors, are available in values up to around 47uF, so they are useful for decoupling (but not in audio amplifiers). Of the two common class II ceramic capacitors, X7R and Y5V, X7R has a better performance with temperature and voltage. So my advise is to stick with X7R, if posssible.
There is another complication though, the size of an X7R capacitor. In general, the smaller the capacitor, the worse the performance.
Just to illustrate the point, a 22uF, +- 10% tolerance, X7R ceramic capacitor may only have a value of 5uF when all the tolerencing is taken into account: 22uF *0.9 (tolerance) * 0.5 (temp) * 0.5 (voltage). And X5U is much worse.
End of sermon.
spec