Low-Cost Rapid Prototyping of Ring Resonator for Dielectric Characterization of Packaging Substrates

This paper presents an alternative method to material characterization by using a low-cost rapid prototyping technique to fabricate microstrip ring resonators. After the design of the ring resonator, the layout is drawn and cut using a craft cutter tool. The copper tape design is placed on top of a single-sided copper-clad Rogers RT/duroid® 5880 substrate and the S-parameters are measured using 8.5 GHz vector network analyzer. The extracted dielectric constant compares well with the datasheet value of 2.20±0.02, which is determined using a split-cylinder resonator at 10 GHz. We see this technique as a way of obtaining first order material properties in less time compared to clean room processing and for substrates that do not benefit from thin film processing.