Bereskin stripline transmission line method
There are several techniques commonly used in the PCB industry for screening of materials as well as quality assurance.
One commonly used method is referenced by IPC and described in the document, “Stripline Test for Permittivity and Loss Tangent (Dielectric Constant and Dissipation Factor) at X-Band”.1 Permittivity and loss tangent measurements are made under stripline conditions using a resonant element pattern card, which is separated from the ground planes by sheets of the material to be tested.
The stripline method was developed by A. Bereskin.2
Drawbacks of this method:
Limited accuracy and repeatability.
The method cannot be easily traced to gauge blocks from National Metrology Institutes (NMIs).
For anisotropic materials, this test method can give misleading values of effective stripline permittivity and loss tangent.
The stripline method from IPC is focused on X-band (8.00 to 12.40 GHz) and hence is not particularly relevant for mmWave frequencies.
References
IPC High Speed/High Frequency Test Methods Subcommittee (D-24) “Stripline Test for Permittivity and Loss Tangent (Dielectric Constant and Dissipation Factor) at X-Band”, IPC-TM-650 2.5.5.5, March 1998.
A. B. Bereskin, “Microwave dielectric property measurements,” Microw. J., vol. 35, no. 7, pp. 98–108, Jul. 1992.
As part of the 5G/6G MAESTRO project, work on this page is supported by the Office of Advanced Manufacturing in the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), under the Federal Award ID Number 70NANB22H050.