Query on capacitor, one large or more in parallel
Depends on what you define &quot;better&quot; as.
There are a lot of pros and cons to using multiple capacitors versus a single capacitor. I'll try to cover a few.
No capacitor is perfect, there is always an Effective Series Inductance (ESL) and Effective Series Resistance (ESR). So a true capacitor looks something like this:



simulate this circuit &ndash; Schematic created using CircuitLab
The values there are just the defaults, not realistic values. Anyway, with frequency the impedance of a capacitor goes down and the impedance of an inductor goes up. Usually the ESL is pretty low, so as you go up in frequency the capacitor dominates and impedance goes down. There is a certain point called the Self Resonant Frequency in which the impedance of the inductor takes over and the impedance starts to go back up.
Usually when you use multiple caps versus a single cap, you vary the value of the cap and even the size of the cap (470n, 330n, 220n at 0402, 0603 and 0805 for example) in order to &quot;shift&quot; the SRF of each individual cap and provide a lower impedance over frequency. Instead of a cusp, you'll have a &quot;flat&quot; area on your Z vs f curve.
This goes for ESR as well. Multiple caps in parallel means that the ESR of the caps combined will usually be less than a single capacitor of equivalent size.
Where this can come back to bite you is that when you have multiple caps, you have longer traces which add in additional inductances. They take up more space which can hurt the routing of other important signals.