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RF PCB Material Selection

wendydu

Does anybody can give some RF PCB material selection guide?

Or maybe give us the tips about how to choose the PCB material while we design RF board?

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  • For most 2.5 GHz or below wireless RF designs we just use FR-4. If the board gets big and loss gets really important then you can get better specified FR4 like the stuff from Isola.

     

    The trick is the layer stackup. For multilayer boards you need to specify the layer stackup carefully as the space between the layers and traces sets the impedance of the traces.

     

    I regularly use simple low cost boards for RF to 2.5 GHz, especially on low cost wireless designs. (I'd probably also use FR-4 for a 5 GHz wireless LAN design too as the RF portion of these things is quite small).

     

    It would help to know what you are trying to do / design so that a better recomendation can be made.

     

    HTH - Steve H.

  • in reply to SteveH
    From our experience I would also suggest using the recommended stack up from your board vendor for your target layer count ... this will certainly be tuned from a process / performance and yield perspective.  Another must would be to add a 'test coupon' to the waste PCB area to enable independent measurement of manufactured impedance. 
  • in reply to zooip
    An extra comment: always verify your design when you have different PCB material and/or different vendors. The change in material might bring your design in troubles.
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