Issue link: https://iconnect007.uberflip.com/i/1503357
10 DESIGN007 MAGAZINE I JULY 2023 Feature Interview by Andy Shaughnessy I-CONNECT007 At SMTA Atlanta Tech Expo and Forum, I met with PCB designer Albert Gaines, owner of HiGain Design Services. Albert has been working on some really interesting , frag- mented aperture antenna designs, and some of this stuff is really pushing the limits. Al and I discussed his work with RF, the dif- ferences between COTS and custom antennas, and his efforts to educate engineers about what they can and can't do. Hi, Albert. Good to see you. I understand you're doing some pretty interesting antenna design work. Tell us about it. We're doing some really fancy designs, com- pared to what we used to do; we're doing the RF Antenna Design on the Bleeding Edge sequential lay-up up of board layers with Rog- ers and other types of high-frequency lami- nates. ey are actually back drilling, filling, and planarizing blind vias on internal layers, and then stacking materials as we need them for the dielectrics we need. Instead of depend- ing on this particular core, we're actually using a single layer of double layer cores, stacking up sometimes two or three layers of special prepreg. en it gets pretty interesting. is is all about trying to get away from having a large parabolic antenna. You have a flat circuit board with all these receivers or transmit elements all over it, and we basically create a grid. It's like the dot matrix of your LED TV—they get