Isola Lays Groundwork for Faster, Higher-Frequency Circuits at 2022 IMS

Estimated reading time: 2 minutes

Isola Group will be well represented by circuit material professionals at the 2022 IEEE International Microwave Symposium (IMS2022) Exhibition in Denver, Colorado. They will welcome visitors to exhibition booth #5090 with detailed data and free guidance on how to trim loss, size, and weight from their high-speed, high-frequency PCBs using Isola’s advanced circuit materials. These include materials carefully formulated for low loss in RF/microwave and millimeter-wave (mmWave) circuits to 110 GHz and beyond and excellent signal integrity (SI) in high-speed-digital (HSD) circuits well into the Gb/s speed range. Isola’s representatives will be accompanied by professionals from Insulectro at the booth.

The RF/microwave industry’s largest annual exhibition and symposium is making a “face-to-face” comeback from the debilitating global effects of the Covid-19 virus pandemic. Over 400 companies are scheduled to exhibit in Denver’s Colorado Convention Center from Tuesday-Thursday, June 21-23, 2022. The full IEEE 2022 IMS conference, workshops, and exhibition extends from June 19-24, 2022.

Isola offers visitors to their exhibition booth the latest news and views on their advanced circuit materials and how to apply those circuit materials to achieve the best results in applications extending across aerospace, commercial, defense, industrial, medical, and space markets. Isola’s circuit materials support the current industry trends in higher-frequency operation and miniaturization, but they do so while paying close attention to manufacturing requirements, with materials that can be transformed into PCBs using the same processes used for many popular circuit materials, such as mid-and-high-Tg FR-4 materials.

For example, Astra® MT77 features low loss through mmWave frequencies, with characteristics such as dielectric constant (Dk) and dimensions that are stable over wide temperature ranges, making this an ideal circuit material for automotive and military radar applications. It exhibits a Dk of 3.00 at 10 GHz with a dissipation factor (Df) of 0.0017 at 10 GHz denoting extremely low loss. For digital circuits, Tachyon® 100G laminates and prepregs support speeds to 100 Gb/s and higher. They have characteristics closely matched to Astra® MT77, with Dk of 3.02 at 10 GHz and Df of 0.0021 at 10 GHz. The coefficient of thermal expansion (CTE)—how the materials’ dimensions change with temperature—are also similar across operating temperatures from -55 to +125°C, making these materials well matched for hybrid material blends in PCB assemblies for HSD and microwave/mmWave circuits.

Another circuit material well matched to Astra® MT77 in CTE, I-Tera® MT40 (RF/MW), has a slightly higher Dk, 3.45 at 10 GHz, but also with very low loss, signified by a Df of 0.0031 at 10 GHz. Both have the qualities needed for many emerging mmWave circuit applications, such as in automotive radar collision-avoidance systems and in 5G wireless communications networks. And both materials are FR-4 process compatible for ease of circuit fabrication.

In fact, many of Isola’s circuit laminates and prepreg materials support a hybrid design and fabrication approach to assembling circuits, by combining materials best suited to different circuit functions, such as for analog microwave signals and high-speed digital signals. Visitors to the Isola IMS 2022 exhibition booth can learn about how different combinations of Isola’s circuit materials, such as I-Tera® MT40 (HSD) and I-Tera® MT40 (RF/MW), halogen-free TerraGreen® (HSD) and TerraGreen® (RF/MW), and halogen-free TerraGreen® 400G (HSD) and TerraGreen® 400G (RF/MW), can work together to help them achieve the most challenging goals for size, weight, and power (SWaP) as well as budget.

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