The performance of a product operating at high frequencies depends largely on the electrical characteristics of the Printed Circuit Board (PCB) used for mounting and connecting its circuit components. The magnitude of the impact of the PCB design increases exponentially with increase of the operational frequency. Therefore, designers need to include electrical models of PCB structures when simulating RF circuits. For achieving optimum solutions, the product/PCB designer and the manufacturing engineer must appreciate the requirements of RF design.
Designing for High Frequencies
Designing a board to work at high frequencies requires the designer to be critical of the following areas:
Materials Used for RF PCBs
RF PCBs can use a variety of different materials. Although common board materials used for high frequency circuits are FR-4 and derivatives of FR-4, many other base substrates are also used as they offer better electrical performance. These include specialized low-loss RF material such as pure PTFE, ceramic filled PTFE, Hydrocarbon Ceramic, and High-Temperature Thermoplastic/Ceramic.
Although FR-4 has its limitations when used for high-frequency work, the RF designer must understand these limitations and make cost/performance tradeoffs for the design. Typical limitations of FR-4 are:
Therefore, selecting a suitable material for making a PCB operating at high frequencies depends on the above factors and the product cost. The choice could range from the low-cost FR-4 material, with its higher loss and not tightly controlled dielectric constant, to FR-4 derivatives with better specifications, or to other specialized low-loss RF material with their well-specified dielectric constant.
Fabrication Issues with Special Materials
All laminates mentioned above involve individual fabrication issues. For achieving the proper quality and reliability, the manufacturer must follow these individual fabrication notes for each substrate material for storing, handling, preparing the inner layer, surface preparation for photoresist application, bonding, drilling, deburring, and plating.
Manufacturers require setting up special processes for fabricating PCBs with low-loss RF materials to work at high frequencies. For instance, plated-through hole preparation is very critical for PTFE substrates—it needs an etch-back process requiring Plasma etch setup to prepare the PTFE hole surface and make it capable of accepting electroless copper plating. Therefore, apart from proper selection of material, following the proper fabrication methods is equally important for achieving a good quality PCB working reliably at high frequencies.
Placement of Traces
For matching the impedance, designers effectively manage the spacing of traces, ground planes, and the dielectric material to form a controlled impedance transmission line. They do this in several ways—in the form of a microstrip, stripline, co-planar waveguides, and differential pairs. The width of the trace, the dielectric thickness, dielectric constant of the used dielectric material and copper thickness determine the impedance. As high frequency signals are very sensitive to noise, ringing, and reflections, they must be designed with great care towards impedance. Mostly preferred impedance is 50 ohms for single ended and 100 ohms for differential, with control limits of ±10%.
Microstrip: This is a circuit trace carrying the RF signals routed on an outside layer of the PCB with a reference plane below it. The reference plane may be power or ground plane.
Stripline: This is a circuit trace carrying the RF signals routed on an inside layer of the PCB with two low-voltage reference planes above and below it. The reference planes may be power and or ground plane. The stripline can be equidistant from the two reference planes, in which case it is called the centered stripline, or it can be an off-center stripline, where it is closer to one of the reference planes.
Co-planar Waveguide: This is a circuit trace carrying the RF signals embedded within a ground reference plane on the same layer of the PCB. Co-planar waveguides (CPW) offer lower loss tangent than microstrips do, but have a higher skin effect loss, as fields concentrate on the edges of the trace and ground. Another form of co-planar waveguide is the co-planar waveguide with ground (CPWG), where a ground plane is placed just below the waveguide layer.
Co-planar Differential Pairs: These are two traces carrying the RF signals embedded within a ground reference plane on the same layer of the PCB. This arrangement is also called the CP Differential Pair or Edge-Coupled CPW. This gives an extra degree of signal-to-noise isolation over the standard CPW. An added ground plane just below the layer offers even better field containment over the coupled CPW, and is called the Edge Coupled CPWG.
Placement of Planes
Most RF products use multilayer PCBs. These comprise a number of laminates of the substrate material separately etched, drilled, and bonded. The chief advantage of this is to allow the use of more than two conductor layers, thereby reducing the required board space, but at increased cost.
Setting up the laminates is a major part of the design for a multilayer RF board. The stack defines the number of layers the board will ultimately possess. At this stage, it is important to define the layers carrying specific high-speed tracks, and the placement of the ground and power layers with respect to those layers. Enclosing tracks carrying high frequency signals within the ground and power layers serves to define two significant factors related to high speed multilayer design—minimizing cross-talk, and maintaining a check on the impedance on the board. However, the cost of the board increases proportional to the number of layers it has, and therefore, the number of layers is usually a compromise of the board’s functionality and its cost.
RF products typically use a four or six layer FR-4 multilayer construction. Drilled and plated through holes or vias link tracks on one layer to tracks on other layers or all layers. Complex structures use blind or buried vias, with blind vias connecting the outermost layers to one or more inner ones, while buried vias connect only the inner layers and do not appear on the outermost layers. The third type of via is the through via, going through all the layers of the board. To create the connections, it is necessary to drill and then plate-through all vias. Via structures have a major effect on the fabrication processes of the PCB and contribute to the cost of the finished board.
Component Interconnections
Parasitic elements of a PCB refer to its physical attributes that affect the performance of the circuit. For instance, at high frequencies, a long thin track will usually be inductive, while a large pad over a ground plane will behave like a capacitor. In addition, when modeling in real circuits for, say a series capacitor, the designer must also include the impedance of the connections between the ground plane and circuit components.
A plated through via hole also adds significant inductance. RF designers can use good circuit simulation packages that include models to allow their addition. For instance, the typical inductance of a 0.2 mm diameter, 1.6 mm long hole can be as much as 0.75 nH. Although this may seem to be small, it can exert significant influence at high frequencies.
Components mounted on the PCB also contribute with their non-ideal characteristics. The use of Surface Mount Device (SMD) components helps to reduce the effect largely because of their reduced lead lengths and small construction, but the effect is still prominent at higher frequencies.
Designers use different ground plane strategies for their RF PCB design, and there is no unique solution as the best strategy. While most designers advocate breaking up the ground plane over the analog, digital, radio, and audio parts of the circuit, providing an individual ground plane of low impedance for all parts of the circuit is usually a good point to start.
Designers need to consider the flow of currents carefully throughout the product to minimize interferences between the audio and radio circuits. This assumes even greater significance if the design uses Digital Signal Processing (DSP) and microprocessors.
RF PCB Layout Strategies and Techniques
Summary
Finally, the design of a PCB and its fabrication for high frequency use is a complex process requiring intimate communication between the designer and the fabricator, with each understanding the issues related to high-speed design.