Characterization of Microdispensed Dielectric Materials for Direct Digital Manufacturing Using Coplanar Waveguides

Abstract

Direct digital manufacturing (DDM) is an alternative fabrication method to prototype and potentially mass produce RF and mm-wave circuits and antennas. One target application are conformal antennas on irregular surfaces. Microdispensed dielectric pastes are suitable for such an application and a microwave characterization process is described in this paper. Two S-parameter-based methods are used to extract the dielectric constant of two different materials. The results show that the average dielectric constant for DuPont 5036 and 8153 are 4 and 27.5 in the frequency ranges of 1–10 GHz and 1–20 GHz respectively. To the authors’ knowledge, this is the first work that presents RF characterization of microdispensed dielectric materials using transmission lines.