what's the RF PCB design material do

you know?

Is plain old FR-4 (also known as

"Glass Epoxy") PCB material
suitable for use in RF designs[1]?
This question comes up time and

again. Many say no, fewer say yes who's right?

Is plain old FR-4 (also known as "Glass Epoxy") PCB material
suitable for use in RF designs[1]? This question comes up time and
again. Many say no, fewer say yes - who's right?
As I have published before [2], I have been using FR-4 material for
years to build not only protoboards, but wireless radios, RF test
fixtures and RF test equipment. This is not to say that FR-4 does not
have limitations, but when you understand the limitations you can
make better cost/performance tradeoffs for all your designs.
So what are the limitations of FR-4? Er (dielectric constant) stability
from lot to lot and over frequency is one of them [4]. Loss is another,
then there is the concern of lead-free processing temperatures and
perhaps thermal conductivity as even low-power RF can consume a
lot of power if the active circuits are biased to provide very high
linearity.
see more at

http://www.raypcb.com/pcb-manufacturing-and-assembly-in-china
Since many FR-4 materials are not not really specified for RF
performance the Er can and will vary from manufacturer to
manufacturer and from lot to lot; sometimes Er is not even specified

by some material suppliers! Does this all mean that FR-4 and "Glass
Epoxy"-like materials can't be used for RF?
So how does one pick a PCB material ? It depends on many factors,
some of which are:

Product Cost

Circuit design, which drives: required impedance stability

Signal Loss tolerance

Operating temperature (Temperature expansion, stability over

temperature, etc)
Heat sinking ability (even low power RF can dissipate a lot of

power)
Soldering / Assembly Temperature (Lead Free)

Some of the above may be applicable to your project and some may
not. Then there are the choices of material itself,
Plain old FR-4, with a higher loss and not tightly controlled

Er[2]

Better specified Er[2] FR-4 derivatives (these may have better

loss also)[3]

Specialized low-loss RF Materials with well specified Er values

and much lower loss

It is a simple matter to go through the data sheets and make a

spreadsheet that compares these items above one by one for
comparison.
This can lead to a bewildering array of options, especially for the
person new to RF. I have seen many cases where people new to RF
have used expensive exotic materials for even low-frequency
non-critical applications simply because someone said that the
application was "RF" and they went into "Over-Specify Mode" just to
be safe, but is this really needed?
Let's look at some real world applications:

High Volume / Cost Sensitive

Cell Phone

GPS Receiver

RF Remote Control

WLAN, Bluetooth, ZigBee et.al. Transceiver

Low Volume / High Performance

Test Equipment

Really high speed bleeding-edge designs

In the high-volume cases you will be hard pressed to find anyone
using really exotic materials in the under 6-GHz world. Take apart all

the items that I just mentioned and you will find materials that look
just like regular old FR-4. In the low-volume but high-performance
category you will find board material that again looks like FR-4 and
you will find higher-frequency materials, especially when the
operating frequency exceeds 6 GHz.
In the low-volume cases, performance may be paramount and the
circuit designs might be more complex. Many of these products do
use a tighter specified type of "Glass Epoxy" or exotic RF materials.
Mainly for their repeatability and for the trace losses.
How does FR-4 really perform?
Figure 1: My standard FR-4 RF prototype board. I use these
2-inch-long quick PCBs to prototype all sorts of filters,
amplifiers and other RF circuits very handy to have
around and they only cost a few dollars each.
In addition to my standard FR-4 prototype boards (Figure 1) I also
make quick turn prototypes on Rogers RO4350B material [5] (a
low-loss, high-GHz material) so I compared the two for insertion loss
(S21). I started with a 2-inch Coplanar Waveguide Over Ground
structure and, using the same connectors, I measured trace loss over
a 130 to 7000-MHz band. I then scaled the data so that it would be in
dB loss per inch. The connector losses were not de-embedded
because they represent very little of the loss and both test boards had
better than 25-dB return loss so there wasnt any appreciable
mismatch loss to account for (Figure 2).

Figure 2: Measured loss per inch of plain old FR-4 and very
high-frequency Rogers RO4350B material. The Rogers
material does have less loss, but even at 2.5 GHz the FR-4
holds its own at less than 0.3 dB loss/inch.
If you were building a 2.5-GHz Bluetooth module and the RF traces
were about an inch long total would you really care about a 0.3-dB
signal loss, especially in light of the fact that the antenna matching
circuit will probably exhibit more loss than this? Probably not. Even
if you used Rogers RO4350B with its loss at 2.5 GHz of 0.13 dB/inch
you would only be saving 0.17 dB.
Welcome to choose RayMing as your RF PCB supplier .

see more at
http://www.raypcb.com/6-layers-immersion-gold-dupont-flexible-pc
b-board-assembly
Sally
Skype:raypcb15
Emailsales15@raypcb.com