Materials for applications over 100Gbps enter alpha testing

30th January 2014

Isola Group

Staff Reporter

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Designed to reduce insertion loss on high-speed digital designs, the Tachyon product from Isola has begun alpha testing. It is targeted at high-layer count backplanes for the growing 100Gbps market that has channel data rates in excess of 25Gbps.

The need for 100Gbps Ethernet has increased due to demand for more feature-rich applications and faster access to computing, high-definition television, video conferencing, video on demand and digital photography. Tachyon materials use spread glass and reduced-profile copper to mitigate skew and improve rise times, reduce jitter, increase eye width and height. Tachyon has a nominal dielectric constant (Dk) of 3.02 that is stable between -55°C and +125°C up to 40 GHz. The material also offers a very low dissipation factor (Df) of 0.0021. These features enable Tachyon to deliver exceptional electrical properties that are very stable over a broad frequency and temperature range, making them suitable for next-generation designs that are engineered to use backplanes and daughter cards with faster data rates.

The materials are available n optimized laminate and prepreg forms in typical thicknesses and standard panel sizes to provide a complete material solution for high-speed digital designs. It has been used successfully to build a 24” x 36”, 36-layer backplane and a 16” x 18” 28-layer board, both 0.300” (7.6 mm) thick. Each board was assembled and tested to validate that it met the signal integrity performance for the 25 Gb/s and greater channel requirement as a fully loaded board. Tachyon is in the same UL family as Isola’s I-Tera MT very-low loss material and uses the same PCB manufacturing parameters.

This new product is in the same UL family as Isola’s I-Tera MT very-low loss material and uses the same PCB manufacturing parameters. Its 70-minute curing cycle at 200°C provides improved press productivity and lower overall cost. Alternatives such as PTFE-based laminates have not proved to be viable either from a cost or from an ease of processing standpoint. Tachyon materials come standard with VLP-2 copper foil.

Tarun Amla, Executive Vice President and Chief Technology Officer at Isola commented, “This product is an example of Isola's capability to rapidly address the needs of the OEMs. This product was developed in response to a specific end-user request. Within weeks, we produced Tachyon ‒ a product that was not only lower in cost, but also very easy to process. As the demand for higher speeds increase, our next-generation laminates and prepregs will enable even faster data rates.”