Eric Bogatin, President, Bogatin Enterprises
Don DeGroot, President, CCN-i
Colin Warwick, Sr. Product Marketing, Agilent
Sanjeev Gupta, Agilent

It is well known that the dielectric constant and dissipation factor of real laminate materials are slightly frequency dependent, as is the loop inductance per length of circuit board transmission lines. While the series resistance is often assumed to increase with the square root of frequency, in most simulations, the assumption is made that the other terms are constant with frequency. What do we miss by ignoring their frequency dependence? In this paper, we will use a model and simulation environment that accurately incorporates the frequency dependence of R, L, Dk and Df to explore the impact on typical high speed serial links from low bit rates to above 10 Gbps due to frequency dependent material properties.