Impact of the Bonding Design Parameters on the Shielding Effectiveness of Board-Level Shields at Microwave frequencies

This paper presents a study of an advanced bonding technique to be used in Board Level Shielding (BLS) to connect BLS components to the ground layer of a Printed Circuit Board (PCB). This bonding method uses parallel rows of vias to connect to the embedded ground (GND) layer and tries to establish a waveguide below cut-off (WGBC). In that way, a higher level of Shielding Effectiveness (SE) of BLS components may be obtained at microwave frequencies. The SE is characterized by using dedicated stripline measurement setup, which is similar to the setup used for the characterization of conductive gaskets up to 40 GHz, as specified in the standard SAE ARP 6248. This paper discusses the influence of different design parameters on the SE of BLS components at microwave frequencies.