A novel method for measuring the dielectric properties of solid materials in the microwave range

In this paper, a novel measurement method for the permittivity of any solid, dielectric material in the microwave range is presented. The general measurement procedure is described, which mainly consists of the measurement of a material under test placed on top of a planar transmission line being measured using on-wafer probes on a wafer probing station. Data on microstrip transmission lines with three samples up to 45GHz is given to prove the applicability of the presented method. A commercially available waveguide technique is used as reference for evaluation. The presented method shows very good agreement with the reference mesurement, whereas no such strict limitations on sample size apply. Additionally, this method allows fast and broadband measurements and should be scalable to higher frequencies such as a few hundred GHz, as long as the planar transmission lines being used for measurement still work in quasi-TEM mode.