Event Calendar

Start Date: 1/17/2024 11:00 AM EST
End Date: 1/17/2024 12:30 PM EST

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Organization Name: iNEMI

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Project Background

 In mid-2022, iNEMI launched the mmWave Permittivity Reference Material Development project to address the lack of traceable mmWave dielectric reference materials. The project was an outcome of previous work by iNEMI’s 5G/mmWave Materials Assessment and Characterization which examined the state of the art for high frequency permittivity and loss tangent metrologies. Through several worldwide cross-laboratory studies, that effort demonstrated that today industry is limited in its ability to accurately characterize next-generation dielectrics. Because dielectric constant and loss tangent are critical model and performance parameters for industries developing next-generation communications and compute systems, inaccuracies in characterizations can lead to very expensive design choice errors in high-volume products. Laboratory-to-laboratory differences, using today’s most advanced commercially available tools and relying on expert users, yielded differences exceeding ±4% in dielectric constant for the same physical samples. Further, because no traceable materials are available from standards organizations such as the National Institute for Standards and Technology (NIST) there was no way to determine which lab or equipment provided the most correct result. Thus, the mmWave Permittivity Reference Material Development project was launched to define requirements for the first traceable standard reference material (SRM) for permittivity measurements in the 20GHz-110 GHz frequency range.
 

Project Results

A material has been selected for SRM development.  This material has been tested using proof-of-concept samples for manufacturability, usability and robustness through two international round robin measurement experiments involving nine laboratories where over 2500 measurements were collected using today’s most common commercially available mmWave permittivity tool sets.  With this data in hand, NIST has concurrently worked to develop a pathway to full international traceability using these materials. This pathway will enable the production and sale of material samples with values for permittivity and loss tangent that can be traced back to the fundamental definition of the SI units. These SRMs can be used as references for both equipment manufacturers and end users, allowing for significant improvements in measurement accuracies for both expert and non-expert users. The availability of precisely known reference samples will also aid the development of new measurement techniques to address the future challenges identified in the iNEMI 5G/6G mmWave Materials and Electrical Test Technology Roadmap.  https://www.inemi. org/maestro
 
This end-of-project webinar will give an overview of the project, describe some of the challenges associated with the effort, and will summarize the project findings that NIST will use to carry on the final steps to achieve international certification for the SRMs it will produce.
 

Registration

This webinar is open to industry; advance registration is required (see link below). If you have any questions or need additional information, please contact Cynthia Williams (cwilliams@inemi.org).
 
Wednesday, January 17, 2024
11:00 a.m. — 12:30 p.m. EST (US)
5:00-6:30 p.m. CET (Europe)
Register for this webinar