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PCBD-Oct2017

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50 The PCB Design Magazine • October 2017 by Andy Shaughnessy I-CONNECT007 Insulectro and Isola recently shared a com- bined booth during PCB West 2017. Insulectro has distributed Isola materials for years, and the companies wanted to focus on Isola's line-up of high-speed, low-loss material sets. Insulectro's Chris Hunrath, VP of Technology, and Norm Berry, Director of Laminates and OEM Market- ing, sat down with me to discuss the challeng- es facing signal integrity engineers today, and some of the Isola low-loss, low-Dk materials that can help with their signal integrity require- ments. You might find Chris and Norm speak- ing to a group of PCB designers near you. Andy Shaughnessy: I'm here at PCB West with Chris Hunrath and Norm Berry from Insulectro. Chris, why don't you start off by telling us a little bit about what you're finding in the field when it comes to signal integrity. Chris Hunrath: One of the things that comes up with my customers a lot in the industry is signal performance. That boils down to a lot of different things, but signal loss and signal skew are two very important things. From a material standpoint, we have a lot of different offerings. What we try to do is help customers match the right product with their application. One of the things that was done many times to help miti- gate skew, is to rotate the image on the panel, but that makes for very poor panel utilization or material utilization. Very popular right now are square glasses. Some of the square glasses have better performance than others for a lot of different reasons. A lot of that is design related, but there are ways to work around that as well. Shaughnessy: Are you focusing more on this from a single integrity standpoint? I know you've had the recent release, you talked about that. Norm Berry: As Chris mentioned, all the work has been done to mitigate differential pair skew, but there are so many other factors involved. Copper roughness certainly; we've been driving that down lower and lower and lower. Our pri- mary offering now is a two-micron roughness, but it's going even farther south than that. Ev- Insulectro Teams with Isola to Address Signal Integrity Needs FEATURE INTERVIEW

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