Eric Bogatin, President, Bogatin Enterprises
Shelley Begley, Senior Product Specialist, Agilent Technologies
Mike Resso, Product Manager, Agilent Technologies

Multi-gigabit systems are pushing the limits of what interconnects can support. An important ingredient in a successful, cost-effective design is knowledge of the dielectric constant and dissipation factor of the laminates used in daughtercards and backplanes. This enables the opportunity to design tradeoffs between the implementation of the circuit boards, the connectors, and the silicon technology. In this paper, we review some of the techniques for accurate dielectric property measurement and the results using a new and robust technique suitable for measurements of more than 10 GHz, applied to evaluating the environmental stability of commonly used laminates.