Copper Roughness and Signal Integrity
What you need to know
There's been a lot of talk over the years regarding copper roughness, yet few hardware engineers or signal integrity practitioners have a detailed understanding of this key contributor to high-speed signal loss.
To keep you from getting surprised by previously untracked contributors to insertion loss, we will discuss 10 critical things you need to know about copper roughness and their impact on board costs and signal integrity.
- There’s no standard terminology governing copper roughness — it’s left to individual vendors
- High speed materials use primary/secondary/tertiary copper foil types — at different price points
- There are multiple ways to measure roughness
- There are several ways to model loss mathematically — which one is best?
- Loss from copper roughness is more controllable than skin effect
- Understanding prepreg/process - side roughness
- There are multiple fabricator process treatments that affect roughness
- Foil selection dominates loss, as compared to process treatments
- Plating’s effect on copper roughness
- Practical advice for managing roughness, loss, and cost
Meet the speaker
Bill Hargin
CEO
Bill Hargin is the chief everything officer at Z-zero, developer of the PCB stackup design and material selection software, Z-planner Enterprise. Bill is an industry pioneer, with more than 25 years working in PCB signal integrity and manufacturing, while authoring dozens of articles on signal integrity, stackup design, and material selection. Hargin is also the author of the iConnect007 publication Stackups, the Design within the Design, a regular columnist for Printed Circuit Design and Fabrication magazine, and a contributing author for the Printed Circuits Handbook.
Bill is a regular speaker and panelist at both DesignCon and PCB West, and more than 10,000 engineers and PCB designers worldwide have taken his workshop on high-speed PCB design. Mr. Hargin served as director of marketing for Mentor Graphics’ HyperLynx SI software and as the Director of North American Marketing for Nan Ya Plastic’s PCB laminate division in Taiwan before founding Z-zero.