Isola Announces Conversion Service in the Wake of Global Shortages of RF Substrates

CHANDLER, Ariz., July 17, 2014— Isola Group S.à r.l., a market leader in copper-clad laminates and dielectric prepreg materials used to fabricate advanced multilayer printed circuit boards (PCBs),today announced that its technical staff would offer a conversion service for PCB fabricators of radio frequency (RF) and millimeter-wave applications. This global 24-hour design review service will enable PCB fabricators to quickly and cost-effectively transition their current RF substrates to Isola’s RF products and eliminate the production backlogs caused by the current shortages of RF substrates. The company also announced that it has increased production of its RF-related materials; Isola’s materials are in stock and ready to ship – as opposed to other laminate suppliers that have extended their lead-times to as long as 12 weeks.

As part of Isola’s design review, the company’s technical staff will respond to customer requests within 24 hours of the inquiry and work to provide on a turnkey basis all of the calculations, testing, characterizations and material recommendations to assist PCB fabricators and OEMs to convert to Isola’s materials. This service will also address some of the commonly held misperceptions about the difficulties of migrating from a currently used material to an Isola material, including the cost of ownership related to material processing, the equivalency of materials available in the market, concerns about thermal conductivity and heat dissipation and PCB fabricator support and credentials.

While other material suppliers’ manufacturing capacities are limited, making scale-up to full production nearly impossible, Isola’s suite of modern, extremely cost-effective substrate alternatives are best in class and have no capacity limitations. Isola has increased production of its very-low loss materials including I-Tera MT, I-Tera MT RF, TerraGreen™ and Astra MT in response to increased lead times by other suppliers in the RF market. Isola has substantial available manufacturing capacity at itsten manufacturing facilities around the world.

Current Isola customers have realized a 50 percent lower cost of ownership due to the processing and pricing advantages of Isola’s materials versus Rogers’ 3000 and 4000 series and similar competitive products from Arlon and Taconic. Isola’s very-low loss materials are ideal for printed circuit designs that operate at wireless communication (700 MHz to 3500 MHz) and higher millimeter-wave frequencies of up to 110 GHz.

Target applications include 24 GHz and 76 to 79 GHz frequencies in use for advanced driver assistance packages, such as adaptive cruise control, collision avoidance, blind spot detection, lane departure warning and stop-and-go systems. Additional applications for Isola’s RF/microwave materials include power amplifiers, base station antennas, DAS antennas, CPE antennas, feed networks, point-to-point microwave links, millimeter wave applications, GPS satellite antennas and other advanced radar applications.