Trouble in Your Tank: Causes of Plating Voids, Pre-electroless Copper
Dan’s Biz Bookshelf: ‘Growth Hacker Marketing’
Happy’s Tech Talk #38: Novel Metallization for UHDI
Isola Launches Low-loss Laminate for 100 GB Ethernet Apps
March 30, 2015 | I-Connect007Estimated reading time: 2 minutes
I spent time at IPC APEX EXPO 2015 talking about Isola’s launch of a low-loss, low-skew laminate prepreg with Fred Hickman, senior director of high-speed digital products. Hickman explains that the new material, Chronon, will be one of the enablers of 100 GB Ethernet applications.
Pete Starkey: Fred, it’s great to meet you. As the senior director of high-speed digital products at Isola, you are the ideal person to tell us about the new product launch. The brand is Chronon and it's a low-loss, low-skew laminate prepreg. Could you just give me a short introduction to this material?
Fred Hickman: Thanks for coming by, Pete, and thank you for giving me a chance to introduce you and your readers to Chronon. Chronon is indeed a new low-loss material for us. Essentially, it's one of the enablers, we think anyway, for 100 GB Ethernet applications, with a combination of good DK, 3.64 DK, less than .004 loss, but also excellent for skew. Fiber weave affects skew so it is a skew mitigator. So what we're proposing for people who currently use other competitive materials on the market, this is a drop-in material with very similar electrical, but very much improved skew mitigation capabilities.
So we have this product, Chronon, and last year we also introduced Tachyon 100G. Both have lower insertion loss, but Tachyon does not have the same ability to mitigate skew as Chronon.
Starkey: Are you in a position to give me a brief explanation as to how you've gone about minimizing the skew? What is it about normal materials that causes skew and how can that be overcome?
Hickman: With most materials, when you change the resin content it has a very big impact on the DK of the material. For instance, our best skew mitigator is GigaSync, changing the resin content from 50% all the way up to 75% and you get about a 3% change in the DK. So if you have lines going across resin/glass it doesn't matter because the DK basically stays the same. With Chronon, the DK change is only about 9% and in that same range, but with most other materials the DK range is around 20%.
Starkey: Oh, I see.
Hickman: So essentially what we're doing is using a combination of spread glass, also some proprietary engineering techniques with which we're minimizing the weave effect of glass.
Starkey: I understand now. It’s really on a microscopic scale. Because there's such a difference in product and concept between glass and resin, if you've got a material where the signal has a glass-rich area and a resin-rich area, you can sort of smooth that out while still keeping the benefits of woven glass reinforcement, but having that reinforcement much more uniformly distributed through the substrate.
Hickman: Absolutely. You hit it right on the head.
Starkey: Well, Fred. Thanks very much indeed.
Hickman: Thank you, Pete.
Share on:
Suggested Items
Hunting for Clues: Feng Xue Solving Circuit Board 'Crimes' With AOI Standard
05/08/2025 | Linda Stepanich, IPCWhen residents in sleepy English villages needed a top-tier detective to solve a murder, they called on Belgian super-sleuth Hercule Poirot, author Agatha Christie’s fictional detective famous for using his “little grey cells” to solve crimes. In the same way, IPC standards development committees, when creating a standard to detect defects in circuit boards using Automated Optical Inspection (AOI), call on IPC A-Team, Hercule.
IPC Strengthens Global Focus with Promotion of Sanjay Huprikar to Chief Global Officer
05/08/2025 | IPCIPC, the global electronics association, announces the promotion of Sanjay Huprikar to chief global officer. This newly created position reflects the association’s forward-looking strategy and industry needs to strengthen the electronics supply chain.
Navigating Global Manufacturing in an Era of Uncertainty
05/07/2025 | Philip Stoten, ScoopThe EMS industry faces unprecedented challenges as global trade tensions rise and tariff announcements create market uncertainty. In an overview of IPC Europe’s podcast, MADE IN EUROPE, industry experts from GPV and Zollner examine how these developments impact our businesses and customers, and what strategies will prevail in this new landscape.
Nick Koop Launches IPC Flex Design Class
05/06/2025 | Andy Shaughnessy, Design007 MagazineNick Koop is director of flex technology for TTM Technologies, and he’s been a staple of IPC’s flex committees for decades. He’s also a longtime flex design instructor, and he’s about to debut a new IPC class, Flex and Rigid-Flex Design for Manufacturability, which will run May 12–21. In this interview, Nick tells us about this new class and what attendees can expect to learn.
The Government Circuit: Trump’s Trade War Disrupts the Electronics Ecosystem
05/06/2025 | Chris Mitchell -- Column: The Government CircuitThere is certainly no shortage of work to be done in the IPC Government Relations department, as the U.S. waged a tariff campaign on practically every industrial country in the world and several countries embarked on high-tech initiatives with a mix of approaches to the crucial foundations of electronics manufacturing. Indeed, the breadth and speed of U.S. President Donald Trump’s tariff campaign continues to be a serious challenge for our industry.