Electrostatic Capacitance Converter

Convert capacitance between farads, microfarads, and picofarads, describing a component’s ability to store electric charge.

Capacitance Measures How Much Charge a Component Can Store Per Volt

Capacitance measures a component’s ability to store electric charge for a given applied voltage, defined directly as the charge stored divided by the voltage across the component, which is exactly why the farad, the SI unit, is technically defined as one coulomb of stored charge per volt applied, tying capacitance directly back to the charge and voltage units covered separately elsewhere in this converter set. A single farad represents an enormous amount of capacitance almost never encountered in ordinary electronic components, which is precisely why practical capacitors are specified in microfarads, a millionth of a farad, for larger components like power supply filtering capacitors, and picofarads, a trillionth of a farad, for the very small capacitance values found in radio frequency and high-precision timing circuits, making the base farad function much like the tonne does for length-scale units, a unit whose full-scale value is genuinely useful mathematically but rarely convenient for describing typical real-world component values encountered in everyday circuit design.