There's a lot of seemingly conflicting information regarding how the load capacitance for a parallel resonant crystal is calculated. Faced with a lot of problems in recent years with non-oscillation and frequency inaccuracy, I'm asking the community's help to get to the bottom of the problem.
How exactly should the values of external load capacitors be calculated?
What's the reason if the oscillator completely fails to start with crystals from some vendor and only completely removing the external load capacitors help? Other vendors' crystals work fine and they advertise seemingly similar parameters (load capacitance, fundamental mode, parallel resonant).
Are all integrated XTAL oscillators in, say, microcontrollers, always Pierce oscillators? Does it have any relevance on the issue?
For reference, here's some information that I've found from the Web regarding the calculation of load capacitance. One IC vendor defines it like this:
One crystal manufacturer defines it like this:
Another website has this to show for an answer:
The equation is C=2(CL)-(CP+CI)
C = crystal capacitor value
CL = load capacitance
CP = parasitic capacitance (wires, socket, traces)
CI = input capacitance (mcu itself)
Quite many seem to think that the load capacitance is the value the crystal manufacturer recommends for the external capacitors. This, to me, seems completely incorrect. (But, as it turns out, might still work perfectly ok).
One web page puts an emphasis on knowing the oscillator inverter's input and output capacitances and gives this answer:
Is there a one true answer to the question? It all seems very frustrating to me. Why doesn't an oscillator start? Why does removing the external load capacitors make it start? How should the external capacitors' value be calculated?
PS. Sorry I can't tell you exactly which ICs I'm working with. But I've seen this happen with quite a few during the years.