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Although the industry has weathered it pretty well, 2020 has been a tumultuous year, full of challenge and controversy. Let's do a hard reboot and start 2021.

Smaller is often wiser in this age of electronic mobility and portability, and the choice of circuit material when starting a design has much to do with attempts to create smaller RF and microwave circuits. Circuit materials with higher dielectric constant (Dk) typically yield circuits with smaller features and dimensions for a given frequency range. But the higher Dk values can also result in increased insertion loss and other performance tradeoffs. The Dk value of a circuit material will also impact such circuit parameters as radiation loss, dispersion, and coupling.

There is a big drive in the market to establish industry standard parts that make products plug and play, or whitebox, to achieve and an open architecture network or system. Here are a few of the main ones affecting the RF market.

Circuit material characteristics and factors within the circuit fabrication process and operating environment all play roles in determining a circuit material’s Design Dk. By being aware of the effects, their impacts can be minimized. Read this blog posting to learn about the different effects.

Successful application of GCPW technology involves understanding how the performance levels from fabricated PCBs can differ from the near-ideal performance levels predicted for GCPW circuit designs by commercial computer-aided engineering (CAE) software tools. A few factors can lead to differences between what the software predicts and what is achieved by a GCPW circuit, especially for mmWave circuit designs at high volumes.

In order to deal with both data access through an SoC and with the potential of an evolving standard, an ideal characterization environment would need flexible signal generation and analysis capabilities capable of producing waveforms compliant not only with the current 5G standard but could also generate new waveforms as the standard evolves. This signal generation and analysis capability also needs to be able to extract RF data from new SoC hardware without requiring the RF engineer to be an expert in programming SoCs. Read how this can be accomplished.