A Method to Determine Broadband Complex Permittivity of Thin Film Dielectric Materials up to 60 GHz

TL;DR

This paper presents a new method combining finite element analysis and microstrip measurements to accurately determine the complex permittivity of thin dielectric films up to 60 GHz, ensuring causality and good data fit.

Contribution

It introduces a novel approach that integrates circuit modeling, finite element simulations, and dielectric fitting to extract permittivity with high accuracy for thin films.

Findings

Excellent agreement between fitted permittivity and datasheet values

Method successfully separates dielectric loss from total loss

Simulations match experimental data up to 60 GHz

Abstract

This paper describes a method to determine the complex permittivity of a thin dielectric film from finite element analysis and microstrip line measurements. Two transmission line equivalent circuit models were used for the cases of an air-filled line and a lossless line, whose distributed elements can be calculated from full wave finite element simulations. With these calculated distributed elements and microstrip line measurements, the complex permittivity was extracted. The technique utilizes a simple way to separate the dielectric loss from the measured total loss and the complex permittivity was extracted using the measured propagation constant. A rational dielectric model was employed to fit the extracted complex permittivity, which ensures causality of the final solution. The best fitting results obtained through this procedure are considered as the final permittivity results, which have shown excellent match to the data sheet values. Moreover, simulations using the fitted permittivity exhibit good agreement with the experimental propagation constant data of microstrip lines up to 60 GHz. The proposed method was demonstrated on polyimide, and it can be applied to other thin film materials.